• Midsummer Security Indicators: Hot and Gloomy

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The hot summer heat is smothering Americans like a tight polyester jacket these days. Also having big impacts on Americans are hackers, security vulnerabilities, spam, and malicious emails, which seem to be peaking with the seasonal fry.

  Security software company Securin scanned 8 million addressable IPs among US state government systems, and discovered 119,000 instances of high-risk services that could be easily exploited, according to a report released yesterday, dubbed “The State of Cybersecurity in America.”

  All told, Securin found 3,700 exposed databases (Db2 among them), 3,400 exposed Secure Shell (SSH) endpoints, 2,780 exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) systems, and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 2

  August 2, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  As we roll into the latter part of the year, many of your organizations – and many of you – are planning what to do to end the year successfully. But making the decision on which way to steer the ship can be very stressful, and companies can stagnate without a fearless leader at the helm. Our Top Story suggestion this week looks at how success comes from action; and why those who delay may not succeed. Not that there aren’t reasons to hesitate, but being able to make the call when to take the risk is a critical skill. …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Fully Managed Disaster Recovery For IBM i Partners

  July 31, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Maxava, a vendor dedicated to High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) for the IBM i market, has announced a new offering aimed at resellers, independent software vendors, and managed service providers, Maxava’s Fully Managed Disaster Recovery (FMDR) offering provides partners with all the components necessary to manage every aspect of IBM i DR. This extends all the way from initial planning, through implementation, ongoing monitoring, virtual and real role swap testing, to 24×7 crisis support in a disaster.

  John Dominic, Maxava’s vice president of global sales, says: “Our partners are telling us that their customers no longer want a …

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• You Guessed It: AI Will Drive Cloud Adoption

  July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What do you think will be the quickest way to try out AI extensions to applications? Will it be trying to get your hand on models, tweaking them with your data, and then integrating the AI extensions with your own applications? Or will it be trying out a SaaS-style AI tool where all of the work is done? Or better still, moving to a SaaS application that has AI in it from the get-go?

  It will be no doubt the latter two options. And this, as much as any other force, is going to hasten the shift for certain workloads …

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• IBM i Work Problem Feature Unemployed For Software Faults

  July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the true differentiations of the AS/400 platform launched 35 years ago was Electronic Customer Support, which at the time involved remote diagnostics and the ability of the machine to reach out over a modem – remember, there was no commercial Internet yet – to connect directly to IBM and report problems as they were happening.

  After three and a half decades, there are a lot of different components and features of the IBM i-Power Systems Electronic Customer Support (ECS) and Electronic Service Agent (ESA) customer care services, way beyond what was available in the original ECS. But recently, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 31

  July 31, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here’s something to look out for: D-mode IPL from tape fails with system reference code B6005121 on IBM i, which you can read more about at this link. Here’s the deal. When the PTF for MA50161 is PERM applied and the PTF for MA50018 is not PERM applied, and a SAVSYS is taken, a D-mode IPL from that tape will fail with the B6005121, which is an operating system task during the IBM i boot process.

  Also, this week we wanted to remind you that software-related issues cannot be automatically uploaded to IBM technical support using the WRKPRB feature …

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• What Will the Next 35 Years of IBM i Hardware Bring?

  July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Will IBM move beyond 64-bit memory addressing for the IBM i platform? What about the potential for quantum processors in the next three-and-a-half decades? These were some of the ideas floated by retired IBM Chief Architect Frank Soltis during the recent celebration of IBM i’s 35^th birthday.

  One of the reasons the IBM i platform is still kicking 35 years after the launch of the AS/400 back in the summer of 1988 is its capability to incorporate new hardware without throwing all the software developed for it into disarray. There are limits to this adaptability, of course, but it’s …

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• Programmers.io Unveils Impact Analysis Tool for IBM i

  July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Programmers.io, one of the largest IT services and software development firm specializing on IBM i, last month unveiled a new impact analysis tool for IBM i that it claims will help customers get a better understanding of their applications as they prepare for modernization.

  Programmers.io is a Fort Worth, Texas, IT services firm that began working on the IBM i platform about a decade ago. Since then, it has built a considerable business around the platform, which accounts for nearly half of its 600 engineers. Many of these professionals are based in India, where the company recruits engineers to become …

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• Infor Marketplace Offers Solutions for IBM i

  July 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Infor, which is the biggest ERP vendor for IBM i, didn’t forget about the IBM i when it updated its Infor Marketplace recently. In fact, the software market features a range of solutions that can run on IBM i and work with Infor ERP solutions running on IBM i, the software company says.

  Infor originally launched the Infor Marketplace in January 2022 with the goal of streamlining the process of searching for and obtaining software that augments operations for its 65,000 customers. Third-party solutions available at the launch included Avalara’s tax automation software and talent management software from Visual …

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