• Rocket Rolls Out IBM i Modernization Bundle

  March 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week unveiled a new collection of tools designed to help IBM i shops elevate their game across multiple IT disciplines. Dubbed the Rocket Modernization Suite for IBM i, the new bundle brings together existing Rocket offerings in the DevOps, APIs, test automation, HA/DR, terminal emulation, and Web-enablement spaces. It’s all about lowering the barrier to adopting Rocket tools and improving customer productivity when they do, the company says.

  Like other software vendors in the space, Rocket Software has accumulated somewhat of a disparate collection of tools for the IBM i server. The Massachusetts vendor started its IBM …

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• Longtime Product Guy Sarrasin Switches to Services

  February 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  For two decades, Marcel Sarrasin was a product guy. Starting in 2001, Sarrasin helped to develop, market, and sell IBM i software, first for BCD, then Quadrant, and finally Fresche. But last year, Sarrasin got a change of scenery when Fresche promoted him to head up its growing services unit, giving the young executive a significant boost in responsibility and the chance to positively impact an important business line for Fresche: digital transformation services.

  If you’ve ever been to a COMMON conference or attended a BCD, Quadrant, or Fresche Solutions webinar, there’s a good chance you’ve run into Sarrasin. For …

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• Realizing The Promise Of Cross Platform Development With VS Code

  January 25, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  An integrated development environment is like a tractor or a truck, or indeed any other kind of tool. There are farmers who want a tractor from John Deere or Ford or Massey-Ferguson, contractors who want a Ford or Dodge or GMC truck, and carpenters and electricians who use Dewalt or Milwaukee Electric or Makita cordless tools.

  No matter the choice of tools, ultimately these blue collar workers are going to farm and build things, and the choice of tool should not interfere with that effort. White collar – or far more likely no collar T shirt – programmers are no …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 1

  January 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i world in 2023? Your guess is as good as ours, which is why we have corralled some of the most respected names in the industry to gaze into their crystal balls and give their prognostication for the year to come.

  Donnie MacColl, the senior director of technical support and GDPR data protection officer at Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), kicks off this year’s batch of predictions with an expectation of more automation, thanks to a lack of skilled employees.

  “Automated operations will accelerate along with migration to the cloud,” MacColl tells us. “Automation is key …

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• Top 5 New IBM i Features to Check Out Now That Fall TRs Are GA

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  All of the new features that IBM unveiled earlier this fall with the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 (as well as another stealth “non-TR” TR for 7.3) are now generally available. Some of them shipped before December 2, but pretty much all of them are now GA. With so much enterprise computing goodness ready to download, what will you adopt first?

  We know it’s not Christmas yet. But with so many new features, it can be hard to figure out what to do first. While everybody has their own computing priorities, we have our own ideas for …

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• Momentum Builds For Code For IBM i

  November 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Energy and excitement are building in the IBM i development community thanks to Code for IBM i, the VS Code extension that enables users to write and edit RPG and COBOL code in a Web browser. Spearheaded by Liam Allan, who now works for IBM, the lightweight alternative to RDi is approaching critical mass among IBM i developers desperate for something new.

  For many years, IBM i shops had few options available to them when it comes to developing ILE applications for IBM i. IBM’s default recommendation was Rational Developer for i, the Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) that …

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• Rocket Rides Modernization, DevOps for Hybrid Cloud Adoption

  October 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Puneet Kohli, Rocket Software’s new IBM i portfolio manager, is under no illusion about how easy it will be to boost IBM i software sales. “This is not a space where you wake up one morning and your CIO says ‘I’m going to go buy a product on the i,’” Kohli says. But a well-thought-out strategy around enabling DevOps and application modernization in a hybrid cloud setting? Now that just might move the needle.

  It’s been almost a year since Rocket Software founder Andy Youniss stepped down from the day-to-day management of the company he led for 31 years, paving …

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• If You Aren’t Automating Testing, You Aren’t Doing DevSecOps

  October 17, 2022 Andrew Clark

  If you are going to automate application development and operations like a hyperscaler, it is not as simple as moving code to a Git repository and then you are done. Security is critical to DevOps – so much that people are now calling it DevSecOps to highlight that fact. The “Sec” in DevSecOps impacts several phases in the development lifecycle – from code quality and security checking to developer-side unit tests and, further downstream, functional regression tests. Provided they are automated, each technique brings major savings in development by “shifting defects left.” In this article, we’ll explore how.

  Today, …

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• The Lucky Seven Tips Of IBM i DevSecOps

  September 14, 2022 Olenka Van Schendel

  The number seven has been a symbol of luck and fortune and design in many ancient cultures around the world, and so it is with the IBM i world. As it turns out, we think there are a “Lucky Seven” key tips for optimizing your own DevOps implementation, allowing you to leverage your IBM i platform for competitive advantage. And we want to share them with you.

  The programmers who create applications for the IBM i platform and its decades of predecessors were given a set of development tools from IBM with augmentation from third parties such as ARCAD Software, …

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• Merlin Development Framework Now Supports IBM i 7.3

  July 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has decided to support IBM i version 7.3 with Merlin, the new application development framework that was introduced in May as part of the IBM i 7.5 launch. The decision should help widen the potential user base for Merlin, even while discouraging operating system upgrades.

  Merlin is a new software package 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 IBM, Red Hat, …

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