• Talking Power Systems Deals With The Boss

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What a relief when you speak the same language with someone in the business. In any business. But particularly with someone in the AS/400 and IBM i business, who has been at it about the same time as you, has seen the same stuff as you, has the same frames of reference as you, and who knows what the hell you are talking about even if they don’t agree with you all the time.

  That’s how it is with the boss at UCG Technologies, that being president and founder Jim Kandrac, who is proud of his city of Cleveland and …

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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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• Rewriting IBM i RPG Software Is Almost Always A Bad Idea

  October 13, 2021 Roger Pence

  There are perils and pitfalls in attempting to rewrite your IBM i-AS/400 RPG applications. While there are some cases where such an attempt may be a good idea, you need to consider the big rewrite option carefully from every angle. It is often the worst step you can take.

  As you start to realize that your IBM i RPG software, at least in its current form, is nearing the end of its useful life, rewriting your RPG application is an obvious alternative. We implore you to give this option very serious consideration before you jump into it. Rewriting a large, …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Talking IBM i System Management With Abacus

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want the members of your IT department to focus on the core applications that define, run, and improve your business, and they also have to manage your systems, and you have limited budgets to do it all, you have to learn to let go of something. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many people to do the work. Something has to give, and you have to keep what brings the real value.

  Having an IBM i platform provides plenty of value to start, as IBM …

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• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

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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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• For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

  Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …

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• The IBM i And Its RPG Decade Of Crisis

  September 29, 2021 Roger Pence

  Your business desperately needs your IBM i RPG applications to deliver your unique business value to your customers and business partners. RPG programming is a disappearing skill; by 2030 the typical RPG programmer will be 80 years old. Your RPG-dependent business is at risk with the disappearance of RPG programming talent.

  The IBM i runs many businesses today and its RPG applications perform unique and mission-critical processes. These businesses can’t get along without them. Alas, the teams that built these applications are rapidly nearing retirement. There aren’t younger RPG programmers in the pipeline. RPG programming is a disappearing skill. Despite …

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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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• The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

  For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

  A lot more than you probably think, as it …

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