• IBM Unveils Fall 2022 Tech Refreshes for IBM i

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM yesterday announced Technology Refreshes for its two most current IBM i operating systems, including 7.5 and 7.4. Security continues to be a big driver of new functionality with 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. But the fall TRs bring a bevy of enhancements across all areas, including the database, IBM i services, open source, application development, and analytics, among others.

  Security has been the number one concern for CIOs for a few years now, and IBM has responded with a number of new features in IBM i. Some of the new security features exist in IBM i Navigator, the GUI …

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• Kyndryl Wants to Connect Your IBM i to Microsoft Azure

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Kyndryl, the former IBM division known as Global Technology Services (GTS), last week unveiled an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will see it helping IBM i and System z customers integrate their applications and data with Microsoft Azure, specifically its low-code, no-code development platform called Power.

  Kyndryl’s alliance with Microsoft will make it easier for companies to leverage the valuable data and business logic contained in their midrange and mainframe assets as they develop new applications in the Microsoft Power Platform, which is a low-code, no-code development environment.

  “Basically, it provides a low-code, no-code environment in Azure for programmers,” …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Simplify IBM i Application Management and Extract Key Insights

  October 10, 2022 Ray Everhart

  IBM i developers and managers understand all too well that application documentation is often out of date – if it even exists. A study from the Singapore Management University says that developers only spend 5 percent of their time writing new code. They spend 20 percent of their time modifying legacy code, and they spend 60 percent of their time trying to understand the code before they modify it.

  As businesses adapt to compete in their industries, IT is pressured to innovate and improve agility while maintaining existing systems. It’s also critical that stakeholders can quickly access data from …

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• Are Code Freezes a Thing of the Past?

  October 5, 2022 Alex Woodie

  After months of work on your modernization project, the consultant helping you is almost done. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the consultant is now asking you to put a code freeze on changes to your old application. It’s not clear whether the code freeze will lasts two months or two years, but it’s absolutely necessary, you’re told.

  That’s the scenario that many enterprises have faced over the years. Whether it’s a monolithic RPG application running on IBM i or a distributed Node.js application running in the cloud, if there are tight dependencies in the components that …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

  August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

  The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

  This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …

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• Altair Delivers More Options for Running SAS Code

  August 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies that have legacy SAS code for analytic applications running on IBM i servers and other platforms but don’t want to pay the SAS Institute for the runtime have another option from Altair, which recently acquired World Programming.

  SAS was the dominant language for analytics for decades, starting in the 1970s, when Jim Goodnight and his colleagues developed the language at North Carolina State University. Goodnight went on to found the SAS Institute, which provided runtime and support for the open SAS code and, in the process, became the dominant provider of SAS solutions.

  The SAS hegemony has only …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

  July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …

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• Managed Cloud Saves Money By Cutting System And People Overprovisioning

  June 22, 2022 Ron Venzin

  For most IBM i shops in the world, a unit of compute, storage, or networking on a cloud or a unit of time for a skilled IT specialist is always going to cost more than what it costs to have such talent in house. And so, you would think, putting an IBM i system in the cloud and managing all aspects of that system will always cost companies more money, right?

  Wrong.

  Here’s the part of the math that people rarely do, and that we do each time we close another cloud and managed services deal for an IBM i …

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• Database And Developer Enhancements In IBM i 7.5 And 7.4 TR6

  May 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has made a number of enhancements to the Db2 for i database with the launch of IBM i 7.5, which becomes generally available tomorrow. It also is bringing new features for developers, including changes to Integrated Web Services (IWS), which will improve REST integration.

  Most of the new features added to Db2 for i are only available in IBM i 7.5, which will give users a reason to adopt it. However, there are a few enhancements added in IBM i 7.4 Technology Release 6, which doesn’t ship until May 24.

  As we previously reported, IBM i 7.5 expands …

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• IBM Merlin Brings New Approach to Developing on IBM i

  May 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM is rolling out a new application development framework dubbed Merlin as part of its release of IBM i version 7.5. Designed primarily as a lightweight alternative to RDi and running in containers, Merlin could provide a guide for how IBM sources and distributes development tools going forward.

  Merlin is a new Licensed Program Product (LPP) offering from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch, or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from …

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