• The Disconnect In Modernization Planning And Execution

  March 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Feeling confident in your IBM i or mainframe application modernization plans? That could be due to your lack of understanding of what is about to transpire once you begin the project, according to a new survey from EvolveWare.

  EvolveWare, the Santa Clara, California, provider of modernization tools, last week released a study called The State of Application Modernization 2023. The 18-page report is based on a fourth-quarter survey conducted by Global Surveyz (that is not a typo) of 200 large American companies in financial services, insurance, and healthcare that are either in the midst of an application modernization …

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• Superior Support: One Of The Reasons You Pay The Power Systems Premium

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are advocating for the Power Systems platform, and the IBM i operating system on top of it, within your organization, you need every bit of evidence you can find that demonstrates the return on investment for that premium price.

  Which is why we are pointing out an IDC MarketScape study that Big Blue just posted as a reprint on its download site covering worldwide support services for the global leaders in enterprise IT. You know, companies like IBM as well as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Pure Storage, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, Juniper Networks, and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 13

  March 27, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This week, the IBM i community has to take a look at two new security vulnerabilities. There are PTF updates for IBM Navigator for it that you need to look at. The updated details for the PTFs for Navigator for i are in the link in the ACS_NAV worksheet. And there is also a defective PTF you probably need to take a look at, too.

  Now, on to the security vulnerabilities.

  First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to cross-site scripting in the Admin Console (CVE-2023-26283), which you can find out more about here. For …

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• IBM i Has a Future “If Kept Up To Date,”‘ IDC Says

  March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The slow demise and death of IBM i has been greatly exaggerated, at least in the eyes of IDC. In a white paper for Rocket Software, an analyst for the storied firm says that IBM i does indeed have a future in customers’ digital strategies, provided it’s “kept up to date.” That’s good news for the community, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

  Application modernization has been an important topic for IBM i shops for decades, particularly when it comes to organizations that believe they’re still living in the early 1990s. While you technically can run …

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• When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

  March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

  A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

  To be a managed …

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• Generative AI: Coming to an ERP Near You

  March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but generative AI technology like ChatGPT is spreading into every aspect of computing, including the large enterprise applications at the heart of business. The technology may not be on IBM i-based ERP suites yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

  The sophistication of AI technology has been building steadily for the past 10 years, thanks to the adoption of massive neural networks that can be trained on huge amounts of unstructured data, such as text and images.

  Dubbed deep learning, the brute-force approach paid handsome dividends for two computational problems in particular: computer vision and natural …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 22

  March 22, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  We’ve seen the layoffs of tech employees ramping up as of late. Amazon, Meta (nee Facebook), Twitter, Yahoo, Zoom, and the list goes on, have all announced significant personnel cuts in 2023. It’s a big turnaround from the midst of the pandemic, when tech companies were on a hiring spree to keep up with the surge to go online when everyone was stuck at home. The good news is IT pros with cybersecurity, cloud, and data analytics/machine learning skills have remained in high demand. We hope our efforts to keep you informed on these topics and learning opportunities have kept …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 12

  March 22, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  We are always on the hunt for something new, but sometimes we find something that is not new but is new to us and maybe you, too. Here is a case in point: The IBM i 7.4 section on the IBM documentation site was last updated in the last half of the year 2021 and now describes the enhancements made to ILE RPG after 7.4 with PTFs. You can see it here. Also, we wanted to point out that we have re-organized the ACS_NAV worksheet contents, adding a bunch of links to documents and several YouTube links. That is …

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• Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.

  In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of …

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• VS Code Is The Full Stack IDE For IBM i

  March 15, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  Back in January, we talked a bit about the rise of the VS Code integrated development environment that was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2015 and that has been increasingly adopted by developers on all kinds of platforms, not just Windows Server. This week, we want to talk about the new features we are exposing in VS Code for users of the application development tooling available from ARCAD Software.

  First of all, we have brought the cross reference information in our ARCAD Observer tool into VS Code in a way that developers can access the object-level and field-level …

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