• Zebra Pivots Into AI, Robotics with Acquisitions

  September 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Zebra Technologies is a well-known provider of barcode printers, RFID scanners, and mobile computers, which puts it squarely in the data path for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. With Monday’s announced acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) software provider Antuit.ai, Zebra is positioning itself for the emerging age of intelligent automation solutions.

  Antuit.ai is a Dallas, Texas-based provider of an AI-powered demand forecasting solution that’s designed to ensure that companies have the right product in the right place at the right time and at the right price. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) offering is used by consumer processed goods (CPG) …

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• Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360

  July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.

  Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …

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• Watson-Inspired Pattern Matching Drives IBM i Performance Breakthrough

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What do human diseases and IBM i performance problems have in common? For starters, they both can generate quite a bit of data. In the case of the humans, it was enough for IBM to train its AI technology, Watson, to find patterns buried in the data and come up with diagnoses. Now the Danish software company iPerformance is using a variation on that approach with GiAPA, its Global i Application Performance Analyzer.

  When iPerformance founder Kaare Plesner saw a demo of IBM Watson developing medical diagnoses, he figured a similar approach could work for sorting through the reams of …

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• A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning

  May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.

  This is …

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• On Your iRadar: Super Smart Chatbots

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), we’re on the cusp of having chatbots that can provide human-like question-answering capabilities. Within a matter of years, according to experts, basic communication between companies and their customers will be handled by AI, leaving humans to handle tougher cases and VIPs.

  The key breakthrough driving advances in NLP are large language models, specifically a class of language model called a transformer network. These transformer networks use deep learning methods to essentially learn the right sequence for words to go together. The order of words has been one of …

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• It’s Not Always Sunny in ERP Land

  March 31, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems remain central to company operations. The expansive application suites are heavily relied upon to automate the core business processes that businesses rely on. However, they’re notoriously difficult to implement, and they do not always do what they’re supposed to. And according to a recent survey, they’re often lousy when it comes to providing a return on investment.

  For its Technology Trends 2021 study, Computer Economics polled nearly 200 IT professionals to gauge what types of technologies they’re using, and whether they’re getting a good ROI out of them. When the results were tallied, ERP came …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

  January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

  Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

  “First, Power systems …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:

  • JIT Compiler
  • Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
  • LSP Enforcement
  • Resource “Classes”
  • Assertion behavior
  • XML-RPC is now in PECL
  • Reflection changes

  This is …

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• Modernization Trumps Migration for IBM i and Mainframe, IDC Says

  September 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that modernized their IBM i and System z applications not only had higher satisfaction rates and lower costs than organizations that migrated off those platforms, but they also benefited from higher levels of innovation in things like AI, IoT, and mobile enablement, according to an IDC study commissioned by Rocket Software.

  In “The Quantified Business Benefits of Modernizing IBM Z and IBM i to Spur Innovation,” IDC analysts Peter Rutten and Randy Perry set out to quantitatively measure and compare various aspects, ramifications, and results of modernization and migration projects involving big iron from IBM. The analyst group …

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• Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

  August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

  Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

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