• How ERP Giants Are Building GenAI Into Their Products

  December 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  We are still near the top of Gartner’s hype curve when it comes to generative AI. Larger companies that have discipline and money, and startups with time and ambition, are finding success with GenAI, but many organizations are still in the planning and roll-out phase. The same could be said for ERP vendors, who have started their GenAI journeys but are expected to ramp up adoption significantly in the years to come.

  Since the dawn of the mainframe age, computers have automated the work that was previously done by people. Large armies of file clerks were no longer needed once …

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• IBM Bolsters Run SQL Scripts In ACS 1.1.9.6

  August 12, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week shipped a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS) that contains several user-requested updates for Run SQL Scripts (RSS), the popular tool that allows users to execute SQL statements. ACS 1.1.9.6 also brings enhancements to the data transfer, IFS, and 5250 emulator components of ACS, among others.

  ACS, of course, is the universal Java-based utility that IBM unveiled 12 years ago to replace Client Access. It’s a must-have tool for any IBM i user, as it contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 …

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• NGS Bolsters Excel Integration in New Release

  August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As far as legacy IT products go, Excel is right up there. Microsoft launched the spreadsheet tool back in 1985, making it three years older than the venerable IBM AS/400. For companies that run both of those products – well, the IBM i server, anyway – an upgrade of New Generation Software (NGS)’s flagship business intelligence tool will have users singing a happy tune.

  While the IBM midrange server is a bit of a niche platform, Microsoft Excel is about as mainstream as you can get. The software is estimated to be used by 750 million people, or about one …

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• How Polverini Enables End-to-End Testing on IBM i

  August 5, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Testing is one of the most time-consuming and least glamorous parts of software development. But doing it well is important, as the July 19 CrowdStrike outage so potently reminded us. When it comes to ensuring that IBM i programs are thoroughly tested, a relatively new end-to-end testing solution from Polverini & Partners can potentially take some of the drudgery and error out of the process.

  Polverini & Partners recently announced ReplicTest, a new product aimed at automating all aspects of the software testing process on IBM i, including unit testing, acceptance testing, regressing testing, security testing, integration testing, and stress …

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• Shield Delivers Monitoring Solution for FTP on IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last month delivered FT4i, a new utility that helps to secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) activity on IBM i. The new tool not only controls who is allowed to use FTP, but also logs all FTP activity to uncover possibly criminal activity after the fact.

  FTP is one of the most heavily used Internet protocols in the world. Across every industry, organizations use FTP to send and receive what is likely petabytes worth of data every single day. If the Internet is a “super highway,” then FTP is the 20-lane workhorse of an Interstate freeway, facilitating information …

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• ARCAD Breaks Up Monolithic Code With New Transformer Tool

  June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There are many different aspects to application modernization: moving from 5250 greenscreens to Web interfaces, adopting the SQL database engine, and using DevOps techniques. Another part of modernization is breaking up monolithic codebases into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be more readily integrated using APIs and Web services, and that’s the goal of a new version of its Transformer product line launched recently by ARCAD Software.

  ARCAD Software already offers several capabilities under its Transformer brand, including Transformer RPG for converting fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG; Transformer DB for converting DDS files to modern DDL tables; Transformer Field for …

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• IBM Cranks Up the Performance for Run SQL Scripts

  April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) users who are tired of waiting for database fields to resolve in the Run SQL Scripts (RSS) facility will be happy to hear that IBM felt their pain and RSS will return data much more quickly to return data with ACS version 1.1.9.5, which IBM shipped earlier this month.

  The speed-up of field resolution time was listed as a concern to at least one IBM i user, who took to IBM Power Ideas Portal to voice his or her concern. “Simply put the resolution of potential field makes content assist almost unusable,” the user wrote. “I …

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• Drilling Down Into New IBM i Perpetual And Subscription Pricing

  April 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, Big Blue increased pricing on its pricing for per-core perpetual software licenses, per user licensing fees, Software Maintenace, and subscription prices back on January 1. We missed the change – again, apologies for that – and let you know about the basics of these and other hardware and software price changes. This week we are going to look at the effect of these changes on the cost of the base IBM i systems software stack.

  To review: On September 9 last year, IBM announced the price increases that went into effect as …

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• ZendHQ Now Runs Fully on IBM i

  April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops running the ZendPHP distribution of the open source programming language and runtime will be interested to know that Perforce Software recently added full support for IBM i with ZendHQ, the extension for ZendPHP that provides observability and orchestration functionality for PHP-based applications. Previously, IBM i shops had to run part of ZendHQ on Linux or Windows.

  Perforce Software originally launched ZendHQ back in June 2022 to give ZendPHP customers more visibility and control of their increasingly complex PHP environments. ZendHQ is a superset of functionality that bundles existing tools that were originally developed for Zend Server customers, …

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• Some Clarity – Well Actually Less – On IBM i Subscriptions

  March 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we pointed out a few weeks ago, it looks like at least some aspects of Big Blue’s subscription model for pricing hardware and systems software is a work in progress. We accidentally saw an IBM document dated February 15 that had updated some aspects of the subscription pricing for machines in the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers and said that others would be updated on May 7.

  In the time that it took us to write that story, which wasn’t long, IBM took the PDF down and said that it needed to make edits to that …

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