• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 1

  January 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  While the month and year ostensibly are just values in the date field, when the calendar flips over from December to January, things feel different. There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism for what the new year will bring. Coming off another calamitous year filled with COVID-19, perhaps it’s we need that even more so this year.

  It has become an IT Jungle tradition to ask members of the IBM i community at the start of the year for their predictions. This year is no different, and so we’ll kick off the first part of our (most likely) two-part …

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• Original and Midrange Dynamics in IBM i Test Tie-Up

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the fast-paced world of DevOps, it’s critical to test your applications in a timely fashion. The quicker you can spot bugs and other issues, the quicker you can fix them and get the new features into production. That’s the gist behind a new partnership recently unveiled by Original Software and Midrange Dynamics, two of the leading providers of DevOps and test automation tooling, respectively.

  On September 30, the two vendors announced they have entered into a partnership that will not only see them marketing to their respective customer bases, but also integrating their respective offerings to deliver, as they …

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• Expanding Fields Is A Bigger Pain In The Neck Than You Think

  October 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  Remember the Y2K problem, when companies had two-digit dates for years in their applications and the millennial turn was coming and they suddenly needed a four-digit date so all the math would work out right comparing the present, future, and past? Well, every time you need to change a field length in your source code – which almost always means making it bigger, not shorter – you have to suffer through a mini Y2K crisis.

  Yes, the Y2K crisis did not bring an end to civilization as we knew it, as some were prognosticating and maybe a few were hoping, …

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• Value Stream Management: Bringing Lean Manufacturing Techniques To IBM i Development

  September 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  When resources are tight, it is important to optimize their usage and maximize the business value they deliver. This is the very foundation of what is called lean manufacturing or just-in-time manufacturing, which more than a few IBM i shops know a thing or two about because this platform has been used for decades by process and discrete manufacturers to automate their businesses.

  The move toward DevOps has allowed software engineers to adopt many of the best practices developed by manufacturing over the last 100 years. These include automating the flow of code, a repository of standard components and a …

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• Quest For The Hybrid Grail: Getting To A Frictionless Cloud

  August 16, 2021 Satya Sharma

  Grail quests have always been a motif in literature and entertainment, and they most always come about because of an existential threat to the heroes seeking the mystical relic. In many ways, grail quests are also equally common in the business world. Businesses have found that a highway to accelerate their quest is embracing hybrid cloud, which recent studies have shown to offer 2.5 times greater value than a public cloud only deployment. But not all hybrid cloud platforms are created equal.

  In an IDC post titled The Road to Hybrid Multicloud, the market researcher explains that “the Holy …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Making Quick Wins Part Of Your Modernization Strategy

  August 9, 2021 Chris Koppe

  IT leaders are being asked to do way more than keep the lights on these days. For many, the recent pandemic has exposed the need for organizations to provide effective digital experiences and enable remote work. At the same time, many industries experienced revenue loss and as a result, have fewer resources.

  Understanding where to focus efforts can be key in helping you drive the best value and stay aligned with company goals. Success often lies in striking a delicate balance between addressing modernization needs and working within reduced budgets.

  The path to modernizing IBM i applications is paved with …

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• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• In Search Of Next Gen IBM i Apps

  June 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What will become of our RPG and COBOL applications? If IBM i chief architect Steve Will has his way, the core elements of them will evolve into what he calls “next gen” applications that can run in the cloud, if necessary.

  “We are not just focusing anymore on trying to help clients get past green screens to mobile interfaces or Web interfaces,” Will said during his recent COMMON NAViGATE session, titled IBM i PLUS Cloud is the Answer. “There are still clients and applications that need to get there. We understand that. But you can’t just stop there now. …

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• Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time is running out if you want to hear about how you can move to modern DevOps technologies and merge them with your IBM i platform, bridging the gap between new and legacy. (We don’t use the word old around these parts.)

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting the how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?

  We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …

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