• Fresche Legacy Gets $6 Million Infusion To Expand

  December 7, 2015 Dan Burger

  It might surprise some people to read about companies that are investing in the IBM midrange platform. After all, at least one of the top research and analysis firms has had IBM i, and before that the iSeries, and before that the AS/400, on a death watch for something like a dozen years or so. Not everyone believes that. And here’s a $6 million reason why the IBM i market is worthy of investment. When IBM i ISV Fresche Legacy looked for an investor that could give the application modernization software company a lift, it found rather quickly what it

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• A Rising Tide

  December 7, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The system business is roaring along in 2015, and it looks like the industry might devour a historic number of machines this year, if the first three quarters are any indication. The amount of capacity that companies are consuming is staggering, and not something the analysts at IDC or Gartner talk about when they put out their quarterly figures. But we like to think these things through. It looks like Power Systems sales are on the rise, too. So maybe, just maybe, a tide is rising that will lift all boats a little. (Provided interest rate increases or some other

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• HATS Now Hooked Into BlueMix Cloud

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops adopting the latest release of IBM‘s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) product will be able to create and run their modernized interfaces on BlueMix, Big Blue’s cloud service. Support for the latest Rational development tools and improved security round out HATS 9.5, which shipped in November. When it comes to application modernization, IBM i shops have a number of options available to them. Many of those modernization tools come from third-party vendors that you have read about in past issues of The Four Hundred and the discontinued Four Hundred Stuff, which included more than 3,000

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• Quadrant Doubles Down on Simplicity with Formtastic 10

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Complexity is a killer in this brave new electronic world of ours. If your product or service is hard to use, don’t expect the masses to come knocking at your door. That ethos of simplicity echoes across all industries and businesses, and it’s the driving factor in a major new version of Quadrant Software‘s Formtastic output management software for IBM i. Quadrant made two important changes to grease the wheels of simplicity with Formtastic 10, the first major new version of the product in years. First, it overhauled the Windows-based design tool that Formtastic customers use to create and

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• Remain Taps JIRA to Heighten Change Management Collaboration

  December 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  Controlling the chaos of collaboration from an application development perspective has proved to be a valuable asset for many IBM midrange customers. Better code, with the bugs worked out before it goes into production, saves time and money compared to debugging and redesigning after the fact. The value goes beyond writing code because collaboration applies to many business oriented teams and numerous end users who are effected sometimes for the better and other times for the worse. Project tracking comes in many flavors, so Remain Software is integrating its application lifecycle management tool, TD/OMS, with multiple popular options. Its latest

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• Urgent Need for Application Modernization Seen at the Federal Level

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Security breaches. Downtime. Poor performance. These are some of the problems federal IT managers expect to encounter if they continue to run legacy applications as they now exist, according to a recent study from MeriTalk. But instead of ditching the old applications and writing new ones from scratch, MeriTalk advocates a selective modernization approach that blends new and old. MeriTalk, a public-private partnership that addresses IT issues in the federal government, recently tackled the topic of legacy modernization with a report titled “Future Ready Applications: The Modern Legacy.” The November 18 study involved responses from 150 federal IT managers,

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• IBM Patches Pair of Security Flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month revealed the presence of a pair of security vulnerabilities in iAccess for Windows 7.1, including one that could allow a local cybercriminal to take control of the Windows PC running the iAccess software, and another that could be used to launch a denial of service attack. Big Blue patched both flaws with a PTF. IBM provided some details of the security flaws with a Security Bulletin N1020996 published November 18, which is the same day it released PTF number SI57907 to fix the flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1. The buffer overflow flaw that was given the

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• Detecting A “Job End” Condition in DB2 for i

  December 1, 2015 Hey, Mike

  An ETL process extracts data from our ERP system and places it in our Business Intelligence systems. It runs 24/7 except for the End of Day process that shuts down the subsystem that it’s in. The SQL process we run ends up dying violently and the parent process fails (without recovering on startup). A graceful exit would be as simple as issuing a RETURN statement! Can SQL detect a shutdown process? –D.S. The ANSI SQL standard offers no specific guideline for implementing some kind of host shutdown process, so you’ll have to rely on the other special OS related views

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• How Many Interfaces Are Enough (To Print A CSV File)?

  December 1, 2015 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. CSV (comma-separated values) files have been part of my working world for years. I like them because they’re easy to build. Users like them because they can easily open them in Microsoft Excel. I’ve written about this before. Let’s end the year with a utility I wrote to print CSV files. I had fun writing it. Maybe you’ll find it useful in your shop. When I need to read a CSV file on an IBM i system, I typically FTP the file from the IFS to a temporary

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• End of Year Feedback

  December 1, 2015 Ted Holt

  We’ve made it through another year. I hope it’s been a good one for you in spite of the hardships and challenges. Let’s read some of the feedback that I received in 2015 and see what we can learn. Hey, Ted: To make a grep search case-insensitive, use the “-i” switch. I also add the “-n” switch to show the line number. catsplf -j 681206/MYSELF/MYJOB QSYSPRT 1 | grep -in 'smith' I also have a SCANSPLF command. It is not case insensitive, but that would not be hard to implement. Keep the great articles coming. –Bryan Bryan wrote in

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