CRM Archives - IT Jungle

The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …
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IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database

January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.

The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …
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Yes, AI Is Happening on IBM i, and It’s Happening Now

October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

Artificial intelligence is often thought of as a futuristic technology that may have repercussions for IBM i, but only in the future. Maybe AI will be important to IBM i about the same time when we have flying cars and moving sidewalks. But as a recent POWERUp presentation by an IBM cloud and AI architect shows, AI is already happening on the IBM i server, and it’s happening today.

Benoit Marolleau, who is the cloud and AI architect for the IBM Client Center Montpellier (France), made a compelling case for IBM i shops to start exploring how they can potentially …
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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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Inside The ISV Revitalization Initiative For IBM i

March 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

The IBM i server’s strengths are well known: integration, ease of programming, ease of administration, security, resiliency, and a penchant for putting up with abuse. But aside from the platform’s attributes, another factor in IBM i’s favor is the community of independent software vendors (ISVs) who write business applications. To bolster this strength, IBM recently embarked upon an ISV revitalization initiative, and it wants IBM i ISVs to know all about it.

In many ways, applications are the face of the platform. It was fairly common for companies to select a business application, such as MRP, ERP, supply chain execution, …
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How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …
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Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …
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The Problem With ERP

March 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of modern business since it emerged in the mid-1990s. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into ERP implementations with the promise of enhanced business processes automation. But was it all worth it? According to new research from Computer Economics, the answer is not clear.

Every year in its Technology Trends report, Computer Economics surveys a few hundred IT decision makers to gauge their satisfaction level with a variety of technologies. For the past two years, ERP scored dead last in terms of satisfaction and return on investment (ROI). In fact, …
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Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.

They have no choice, living in the future as we do.

The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …
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