• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Scaling Up For Cyber Monday With IBM i

  November 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A fulfillment company that’s expected to process millions of transactions on an IBM i server today will lean heavily on a slim layer of RPG-based Web services technology to keep the commerce flowing for its large clients. But there’s nothing stopping the middleware, dubbed iWebSrv, from simplifying data integration for clients in other industries.

  Retailers work all year to ensure they’re ready for the massive surge of traffic that springs up after Thanksgiving. For bricks-and-mortar types, Black Friday is their make-or-break day, while those with an omni-channel bent have Cyber Monday prominently circled on their calendars.

  Consumers are expected to …

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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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• Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

  November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

  In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• Getting Progressive About Regression Testing

  October 22, 2018 Jeff Tickner

  (Sponsored Content) If you want to employ modern software development and testing techniques, you have to move on from simple unit testing by developers and implement regression testing in your quality assurance (QA) organization. This is perhaps the best way to take the risk out of continuous development – something that companies have to embrace if they are to remain competitive.

  The difference between regression testing and normal testing is that in the most common model, the developer has a request to fix a problem or to add a feature, and they make their changes and do unit …

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• RPG, Java, And The Future Of Infor’s IBM i ERP Suites

  October 17, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Infor is in the midst of a multi-year overhaul of its three RPG-based ERP suites for manufacturers, which include LX, XA, and System 21. When the overhaul is complete, the products will still run on the time-tested IBM i server, but the code behind the products will look significantly different.

  In response to changing technology and customer expectations, Infor essentially is rewriting all three ERP suites using something called the Infor Development Framework. The IDF was originally developed to help transition the bulk of the Infor ERP XA product (MAPICS) from RPG to Java, and now it’s being used for …

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• New Open Source ERP Suite Written In ILE RPG

  October 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  There’s something quite novel being introduced today at the Fall COMMON conference in Pittsburgh: An open source ERP package written in free-form RPG. Dubbed intERPprise, the software project is intended to harness core IBM i strengths – its integrated database and ILE environment – but above all, provide an example for what modern and native open source software can look like on IBM i.

  The intERPrise project (www.i-nterprise.org) was spearheaded by a group of IBM i advocates, including Chris Hird and Marinus van Sandwyk, who wanted to demonstrate what a modern business application would look like – and …

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• Infor Elaborates on Coleman, IBM i Strategy

  October 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When Infor held its annual Inforum conference two weeks ago, the new AI bot Coleman played a big part, but nary an IBM i word was muttered publically. But that shouldn’t come as a concern to the thousands of companies that rely on the company’s IBM i software to run their businesses, Infor’s IBM i strategy Ross Freeman leader says.

  “We heard the same from Syteline customers. They didn’t hear much about Syteline,” says Freeman, who heads up IBM i strategy for the LX, XA, and System 21 ERP product lines. “We have 235 products and we’re all following the …

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