• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.

  We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical …

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• How ERP Giants Are Building GenAI Into Their Products

  December 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  We are still near the top of Gartner’s hype curve when it comes to generative AI. Larger companies that have discipline and money, and startups with time and ambition, are finding success with GenAI, but many organizations are still in the planning and roll-out phase. The same could be said for ERP vendors, who have started their GenAI journeys but are expected to ramp up adoption significantly in the years to come.

  Since the dawn of the mainframe age, computers have automated the work that was previously done by people. Large armies of file clerks were no longer needed once …

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• Slicing and Dicing the Future of the Cloud ERP Market

  November 6, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The cloud looms large in the world of enterprise software. Nearly all ERP vendors offer their software in the cloud, and some, such as SAP, are even planning to end support for on-prem deployments. But how big is the market for cloud ERP, who are the leading providers, and what does it all mean for IBM i customers?

  For starters, how big is the global ERP market? This is an important question, but there is no exact answer. The definition of what is enterprise resource planning software is a little bit amorphous, and amortization schedules can make assigning spending to …

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• ISE Grows MSP Business With Maxava’s Monitor Mi8

  September 16, 2024 Ash Giddings

  Maxava, the global provider of innovative monitoring, high availability, and disaster recovery software and services solutions for the IBM i platform, announced today that Information Systems Engineering (ISE) is finding success using Maxava’s Mi8 to monitor its clients IBM i systems.

  ISE, which provides consulting, software, and managed services for IBM i clients, was founded in 1984. The company’s specialty is working with the Infor XA (MAPICS) line of ERP software. The company also owns Paper-Less, a manufacturing execution solution (MES). Experts in the IBM i, ISE employees have over 300 years of RPG programming experience and over 70 years …

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• Finding Replacements for EOL’d Ecommerce App for JD Edwards

  May 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Fiserv is no longer selling or supporting ERP2Web, an ecommerce product used in JD Edwards environments. Companies have several options for replacements, including open source ecommerce applications like Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) running in the cloud, which is the path recommended by Briteskies.

  ERP2Web is an ecommerce product from Fiserv designed to extend JD Edwards ERP systems with B2B capabilities around order entry, order management, product catalog, item availability, pricing, tax information, shipping, and sales order inquiries, among other capabilities.

  Earlier this year, Fiserv announced that it was ending support for ERP2Web, it obtained with its $22 billion acquisition of …

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• Visualizing the Business Apps Used In the IBM i Marketplace

  April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops run an incredibly diverse array of software, including open source programs, packaged applications, and homegrown software. When it comes to business applications, data from the last nine State of IBM i Marketplace Surveys from Fortra helps to tell the tale.

  The IBM i platform was born to run applications. It’s right there in the original name, after all: Application System/400. Software vendors flocked to support the AS/400 following its launch in 1988, and while there has been some attrition over the years, there remains a strong core of vendors developing and supporting applications running on the platform. …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• Gird Yourself for Digital Transformation Failures in 2024

  February 14, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Spring is still more than a month away in the Northern Hemisphere, but change is already in the air when it comes to enterprise IT departments in 2024, who are under the gun to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, particularly those involving artificial intelligence and the cloud. Rosy predictions of business bliss typically accompany the start of these projects, but the reality is most of them are likely to go off the rails and end in IT failures.

  That’s the informed opinion of Eric Kimberling, the CEO of Third Stage Consulting and a grizzled veteran of ERP implementations and digital transformation …

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• Rocket Launches CM-Kit for Continuous Modernization

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve read about continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI-CD. Now Rocket Software wants you think about a related topic called continuous modernization, which refers to an uninterrupted re-invention of your applications via Web enablement and APIs. It recently launched a new suite of software, called the Continuous Modernization Kit, to help customers deliver that on their IBM i servers.

  Web-enablement of greenscreen 5250 applications has been a thing since at least the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom drove the initial commercialization of the Internet. That was followed closely by mobile enablement, which Apple turbocharged with its 2007 launch …

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• Getting [Stuff] Done Done With Briteskies

  December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i ecosystem is big enough, and changes enough with the times, that we are still finding companies who are relatively new to the base but who have been around for a bit of time who are doing interesting things and who are not quite on our radar. Part of what we do is seek these companies out so we can tell you about them, what they are doing, what they see in the market, and how they can help you.

  Such is the case with Briteskies, a consultancy based in Cleveland, Ohio, that we have written about …

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