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Digital Integration Hubs Emerge To Accelerate Transformations
February 7, 2022 Alex Woodie
A new design pattern called a digital integration hub is emerging to help organizations with legacy applications reap the benefits of digital transformation — not by moving off battle-hardened platforms and legacy ERP systems, but by piping data from them into a fast, new data store that interfaces with Web services.
Former Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini is credited with popularizing the digital integration hub (DIH) concept in 2019. The DIH essentially is a fast database, often implemented atop in-memory technology, that stores the data required to serve new applications implemented as part of a digital transformation project, such as big …
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We Have The Whole World Of Cloud In Our Hands
October 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cloud is a consumption model more than anything else, but it is also an architecture. What that really means is that for a lot of customers, on premises cloud is a bit different from what are called “public” clouds, which we all know are as proprietary as any System/3X or AS/400 or IBM i on Power Systems ever was. There ain’t nothing at all public about it, and we are trying to break the habit of calling them that. The point is, the big clouds outside of your datacenter look like power utilities, with pricing based on both time and …
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Fresche Buys Abacus To Integrate From IBM i To Cloud To Code
October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest provider of application development and modernization tools for the IBM i platform and its predecessors, acquired Abacus Solutions, a long-time provider of cloud and managed services for the same market, giving a new meaning to the word integration in the IBM i brand. Now, with the combination of Fresche and Abacus, we can add an adverb to the intransitive form of the verb: vertically integrated.
Vertical integration is all the rage these days, at least among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that consume half of the IT gear in the world and …
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What IBM i Shops Want From Cloud, And How To Do It Right
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is no secret to readers of The Four Hundred that we are big proponents of so-called cloud computing, which doesn’t just include access to slices of servers but also storage to keep their data and networking to link them to the world and, if multiple slices share work, to link them to storage and to each other.
We never liked the term “cloud,” because it connotes a fuzzy kind of infrastructure when quite the opposite is true. We still don’t like calling it cloud computing, but language is created by consensus, not by fiat, so sometimes we have to …
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Public Cloud Dreams Becoming A Reality for IBM i Users
August 23, 2021 Alex Woodie
For years, IBM i professionals have looked on as their X86 colleagues moved data and applications to the cloud, where they take advantage of sophisticated analytics and AI offerings, while they dutifully tend to their Power Systems boxes, as they have for years. But with IBM i runtimes in at least two public clouds (and possibly more in the works), IBM i shops are finally starting to realize their public cloud dreams.
The nature of the IBM i cloud solution that Meridian Group International is offering has changed over the years. Like many other IBM business partners, the Deerfield, Illinois, …
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Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation
March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie
In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.
2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …
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PHP’s Legacy Problem
March 1, 2021 Alex Woodie
PHP is one of the most popular languages on the Web, with arguably billions of lines of code in use across hundreds of thousands of applications. But that long history of successful use exposes a problem for PHP that IBM i shops will be all-too familiar with: a severe reluctance to upgrade. A recent survey by Perforce puts PHP’s legacy situation in perspective.
In January, Perforce (which owns Zend) published its 2021 PHP Landscape Report, which is based on a survey of 670 developers and administrators that Perforce conducted last fall. That was just before the delivery of PHP …
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What Does This Year Look Like For IT Spending?
February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those who run businesses always keep two sets of data in their heads. One set is how their own business is doing relative to itself over past months, quarters, and years. And the other is how the economy at large is doing. Figuring out the correlation between the two, and what to do as these two data sets converge – or don’t – is essentially the task of upper management. It’s an art, not a science.
Around this time every year, we like to take a survey of what the big IT consultancies say in regard to IT spending to …
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Now You Can Transform RPG Code Into PHP
September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Assuming an average of 5 million lines of code at IBM i shops – a number I heard recently thrown around – in their homegrown or heavily customized third party applications, IBM i shops are collectively sitting on something like 750 billion lines of code. Just ponder that for a minute.
This code, which is predominantly written in RPG but with a fair proportion of Java and COBOL plus a smattering of more modern languages, is going to have to be maintained and tweaked in the coming years. Just like it had to be updated and debugged time and again …
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New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps
August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …
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