• RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC’s Earnings Miss

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Depending on where you live in the world, there’s either a shortage or a surplus of RPG programmers at any point in time, a dynamic we have covered here in IT Jungle. But rarely has the availability of IBM i programming talent so publicly affected a company as it did last week, when the CEO of Computer Sciences Corp. blamed his company’s $230 million-plus revenue shortfall in part on a shortage of RPG coders. Mike Lawrie, the president and CEO of CSC, said “execution missteps” related to personnel recruitment were partly to blame for a revenue shortfall in the

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• Five IBM i Facts That Will Surprise Your CIO

  February 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Trying to keep the IBM i relevant in your organization? It probably seems like an uphill battle at times, especially if you have a CIO who knows next to nothing about the platform. Here are five fun facts that may help save the platform at your organization, or at least get the CIO to give it a second look before he kicks it to the curb. Fact 1: IBM i on Power is cheaper in the long run than Windows or Linux on Intel The sticker shock associated with the acquisition of a new IBM i server can be damaging

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• Conference Puts IBM i System Management In Spotlight

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  System management skills on IBM i have never been showcased in their own conference, but that’s about to change. A two-day conference co-hosted by the COMMON user group and i In the Cloud, a managed service provider, is scheduled for March 3 and 4 in suburban Chicago. The session agenda includes two tracks: one is straight-forward systems management while the other is specific to virtualization skills. Instruction is being handled by system admin subject experts Larry Bolhuis and Pete Massiello. Technologies such as virtualization, the cloud, analytics, and mobile and social front-ends each require a good grasp of the

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• HelpSystems, SoftLanding Partner To Upgrade TurnOver

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  SoftLanding has collaborated with HelpSystems to obtain more modern cross-referencing and documentation tools for SoftLanding’s widely used change management tool, TurnOver. The partnership, which was announced last week, involves the integration of a more modern version of HelpSystems’ application development tool, called ABSTRACT, with the goal of enhancing software development capabilities for IBM midrange shops using TurnOver. TurnOver (referred to as TurnOver for iSeries v100 edition in the company’s literature) supports repeatable procedures for developing and maintaining IBM i applications, including issue tracking, project management, development, and deployment. It is used by IBM i ISVs and development departments in IBM

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• IBM Europe Deals On Power Systems, Raises Storage Prices

  February 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the new year under way, with IBM shipping a substantially completed Power8-based system lineup, and with the company eager to ramp up its Power Systems sales, it would be reasonable to expect for Big Blue to be wheeling and dealing here in the first quarter of 2015. As it turns out, IBM has been quiet as a mouse on the deal front in the United States and Canada, but the company is cutting deals in Europe to bolster Power System sales. At the same time, paradoxically, and no doubt due to the strengthening US dollar, IBM Europe is raising

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• Startup OpenLegacy Open Sources App Modernization Tool

  February 16, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A company called OpenLegacy is beginning to gain momentum with a suite of free and open source tools for modernizing IBM i and z/OS applications. Besides giving away most of its technology (it charges for support in its professional edition), the company is also unique with its API-driven approach to giving older apps new life with Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces. OpenLegacy was founded in Israel about a year ago with the goal of helping organizations expose their IBM i and z/OS assets in new and useful ways. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Romi Stein, is a former IBMer and

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• PHP Changes IBM i Shops, And They Change The PHP Community

  February 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  What has PHP done to buck the trend in IBM midrange shops to resist change? Fear of disrupting traditional business policies and procedures is not unusual and it’s not unique to the IBM i community. Change is scary, but it can also be exciting. PHP has brought about a pretty fair share of change. And in the process, PHP has changed. The IBM i PHP community has changed, too. There are a lot of companies that leverage their RPG development staffs by cross-training them in PHP, a server-side scripting language designed for Web development but also used as a general

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• VAI Rides a Rocket. . . 2015 IBM i Predictions from Raz-Lee. . . New Storage Solutions from Quantum. . .

  February 12, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i predictions for 2015 keep rolling in, this time from the folks at Raz-Lee Security. The folks at VAI have a lot of experience with application modernization, but you’ll never guess which technology they’re using now. We’ll also take a look at some of the IBM i topics that will be covered at IBM’s upcoming InterConnect 2015 conference. VAI Rides Rocket to the Web. . . and Beyond Over the years, VAI has tried many different technologies to modernize the user interface of its RPG-based ERP application. Not all have panned out, and today it appears it has

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• Remain Software ALM Tool Gets CA Plex Interface

  February 11, 2015 Dan Burger

  Independent development environments such as CA Plex have their own model-based and pattern-driven development techniques to modernize legacy IBM midrange applications as they run across multiple platforms as well as move them to the Web and to SOA environments. And as IBM i shops take on modernization projects, change management software is integral to the process. As an example, Remain Software that is announcing its application lifecycle management software, TD/OMS, has a new interface for CA Plex users. The integration is the result of cooperation with Stella Tools, a CA Plex open source initiative. “The way the two tools

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• Vision Reflects on Clouds, ‘Shadow IT’ in Latest Resilience Report

  February 11, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The cloud has become pervasive in the business IT world at most organizations. However, the rise of “shadow IT” services living on the cloud threatens to undermine companies’ data and application resilience strategies, particularly in light of the increasingly complex, hybrid cloud/on-premise setups that are becoming popular today, Vision Solutions says in its annual State of Resilience report 2015. According to Vision’s survey, 62 percent of IT executives report using cloud services at their organization. Apparently, the old debate about whether an organization should adopt “the cloud” is over. Cloud-based services are clearly popular and are here to stay, and

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