• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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• How Much Software Budget Does AI Drive?

  December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fake brain-like software based on neural networks is all the rage now, and probably will be for the next decade or so, but you may be surprised at how much money is being spent on software that has some sort of AI embedded in it and also to learn what a small piece of the overall IT market that this AI software represents at this point in IT history.

  The market researchers and prognosticators at Gartner recently tried to case the AI software market, and looked at how much money the top five use cases for software that have AI …

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• 2021 Almost Done, Happy Holidays From IT Jungle To Everyone

  December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As far as I can tell, it is really March 654^th, 2020 as we bring the 31^st volume of The Four Hundred to a close here in what people are still calling 2021 for nostalgia’s sake. We are grateful to have served another year for the IBM i community, and we look forward not only to a well-deserved rest but also to building up some reserves of energy during the holiday season to take on 2022.

  By all indications, it looks like 2022 will be an interesting year for the Power Systems platform, with entry and midrange …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: IBM Champion Ash Giddings

  December 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but not everybody who has worked on an AS/400, iSeries, System i, or IBM i platform is a programmer. Even if they care a great deal about programs and how they run on the boxes. Ash Giddings, who is an IBM Champion in 2021 and a newly appointed product manager at high availability software provider Maxava, is one such chap, and we got an opportunity to have a chat with Giddings about what is going on with performance management, systems management, disaster recovery, and high availability out there in the IBM i base.

  Like …

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• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December. and since nothing much else is going on, let’s take a quick waltz through the IT Jungle archives to see what kind of year it was. It all started back in January, when…

  Our esteemed founding editor tried to convince IBM what is plainly obvious: That the IBM i installed base is “still its very largest enterprise computing customer base” (emphasis added). Yes, there are more Red Hat licenses, but when it comes to unique companies, IBM i, with around 120,000 customers around the world, is still tops. Will IBM do the hard work to find a (virtualized) …

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• Guru: Global Variables in Modules

  December 13, 2021 Ted Holt

  When I first learned to program computers (RPG II, COBOL 74), the only kind of variables I knew of were global variables. Any statement within a program was able to use any variable.  It was not until I started my computer science degree that I found out about local variables, which are known to only part of a program. Since that time, it has been my practice to use local variables as much as possible and global variables only when necessary.

  Ideally an RPG program, service program, module, or subprocedure would have no global variables at all, but I don’t …

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• As I See It: The Ideal Workplace

  December 13, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Traditionally, at yearend, I would write a predictive article about IT trends and prospects for the coming year. But if you’re not among the lucky few who have been abducted by aliens and kept closeted these past two years, you doubtless already know that our foreseeable future will include more dreck and disruption, liberally peppered with stress and uncertainty.

  Of course, computers could care less, but the people who work with them do, so writing about anything uplifting was preferable to another dose of dour reality. I wracked my brain to find it, failed miserably, and was about to settle …

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• The Four Hundred Guru Retires

  December 13, 2021 Ted Holt

  This is the last issue of The Four Hundred for which I am serving as technical editor.

  I have been editing the technical content of and writing articles for this august publication for 20 years. For most of that time, this has been a side job that I’ve done outside of normal working hours (i.e., nights and weekends). I’m ready for a change. Technical editing and writing are not easy and they take a lot of time, time that I had rather spend doing other things.

  In the days ahead I plan to spend:

  • Less time sitting and more time

  … Read more

• Want to Modernize? Great! Now Get to Work

  December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization has been one of the more popular topics through the course of 2021. After the initial scare of COVID-19 wore off and the pandemic wore on, many companies came to the conclusion that older applications were hobbling their ability to compete in an increasingly digital world. While it’s clear the desire for modernization in the cloud is building, what’s unclear is the extent to which that will translate into action at IBM i shops.

  The COVID-19 pandemic and economic lockdowns rewarded two groups: companies that had largely digital business plans, and those who could run their applications in …

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• Trinity Guard Update Brings Joy to System Values, SIEM Integration

  December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i administrators who ever desired more control over their system value settings will appreciate the latest gift that Trinity Guard has placed under its customer’s midrange trees. The IBM i security software vendor now has a dashboard that automatically tracks all IBM i system values, even across multiple systems or LPARs. The company is also providing a bulk data transfer to SIEMs to stay on top of the work of naughty elves with TGSecurity Suite 2.4.

  The new system values module that Trinity Guard is shipping with the update to TGSecure (one of three products that make up the …

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