• 2015: An IBM i Year In Rear View

  December 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Here we are, at the end of the year, and the last issue of The Four Hundred for 2015. We can all celebrate the fact that the IBM i platform and community survived another 12 months in a ruthless IT market that’s hell-bent on disrupting entire industries. So give yourself a pat on the back, sit down and get ready to revisit the highs and lows of the IBM i platform and community over the past year. January The new year began with–what else?–another IBM reorganization. CEO Ginni Rometty decided to make IBM Systems group a single unit that included

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• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle

  December 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The weather may not know it in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but the holiday season will soon be fast upon us and that means it is time to put away the pens and keyboards here at IT Jungle and to spend some time with family and friends. The Four Hundred has been a part of the IBM midrange community almost as long as the AS/400 and its progeny have been around, and like the AS/400 itself, The Four Hundred has antecedents that have an even longer history. The point is, we have been listening and learning about the IBM

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• IBM i Horror Story With A Happy Ending

  December 7, 2015 Dan Burger

  Users of IBM i and its predecessors have had their share of horror stories. Those on any other business computing platform can say the same. However, I think it’s fair to say the IBM midrange platform is no worse than any other and is better than its competition in many ways. But that doesn’t make it a fairy tale. Evidence of this is the IBM Entitled Systems Support. Also known as the portal to hell. For just about anyone who has tried to order a product or a product upgrade from IBM, this is a horror story. The needle on

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• As I See It: Revolving Door

  December 7, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Just when you think the excesses and oddities of the Internet can no longer surprise, along come reports of an online ISIS “help desk”–24/7 assistance for the budding jihadist. Well, it turns out the reports were inaccurate. It’s not a single point of contact, but a “decentralized, multi-platform recruit outreach,” according to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. Regardless, trolling for expendable volunteers willing to detonate themselves for your cause certainly marks a departure from the ordinary array of bile-flavored hate sites. Suicide bombers originate in many countries, and are subject to a variety of cultural influences. But if they have

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• ISVs In Denial About Software Licensing

  December 7, 2015 Alex Woodie

  “The only constant. . . is change.” That cliché is enough to induce a vigorous eye roll from hardened IT pros, but it’s actually apropos for the IT industry, which feeds off disruption like the Kardashians feed on media attention. Now, a pair of new studies indicate a large number of software vendors are ill equipped to handle the current round of cloud- and mobile-induced IT chaos. The rise of powerful smartphones and tablets has eliminated the need to have a Windows PC or laptop to access many enterprise software applications. That’s a huge win for enterprise software users and

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• 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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