• Digital Integration Hubs Emerge To Accelerate Transformations

  February 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  A new design pattern called a digital integration hub is emerging to help organizations with legacy applications reap the benefits of digital transformation — not by moving off battle-hardened platforms and legacy ERP systems, but by piping data from them into a fast, new data store that interfaces with Web services.

  Former Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini is credited with popularizing the digital integration hub (DIH) concept in 2019. The DIH essentially is a fast database, often implemented atop in-memory technology, that stores the data required to serve new applications implemented as part of a digital transformation project, such as big …

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• Infor Touts Benefits of Industry-Specific ERP

  February 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Infor executives took to the digital airwaves last week to discuss the company’s strategy for delivering industry-specific ERP solutions, which they claimed can deliver better functionality to customers in less time, with lower costs and fewer risks.

  The fear of time-consuming, expensive, and risky customizations is palpable among enterprises, Infor CEO Kevin Samuelson said during a roundtable with fellow Infor executives at last week’s Inforum Digital event.

  “The reality is, when we go in to talk to a customer, they’re nervous because there’s a reputation for projects taking too long, costing much more than expected, and companies ultimately not getting …

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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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• IBM i Community Predictions for 2022, Part 2

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The new year is upon us, which means it’s time for predictions. We continue where we left off on Monday with our second installment of predictions from the IBM i community.

  The way Fresche Solutions Chief Product Officer Marcel Sarrasin sees it, 2022 will be a period of heightened competition in the business jungle.

  “Technology advancements and changing markets will drive new competitive threats in 2022, creating the urgent need for new digital solutions to help companies thrive, survive and grow,” Sarrasin says. “Focus will be on new IT products and applications that will deliver improved business processes, pave the …

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• Want to Modernize? Great! Now Get to Work

  December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization has been one of the more popular topics through the course of 2021. After the initial scare of COVID-19 wore off and the pandemic wore on, many companies came to the conclusion that older applications were hobbling their ability to compete in an increasingly digital world. While it’s clear the desire for modernization in the cloud is building, what’s unclear is the extent to which that will translate into action at IBM i shops.

  The COVID-19 pandemic and economic lockdowns rewarded two groups: companies that had largely digital business plans, and those who could run their applications in …

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• Fabric Company Keeps to Its Knitting with Cleo

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Camira Fabrics Ltd. has historically run its core operations on the IBM i platform. But when the UK company started expanding through acquisition, it suddenly found itself running a number of specialized ERP systems. Rather than embarking upon risky migrations, the company took an integration-based approach using tools from Cleo.

  Based in Mirfield, a city in Northern England, Camira Fabrics has been making fabrics for nearly 200 years. The company today designs and manufacture upholstery and panel textiles for a range of uses, including education, healthcare, hospitality, busses, RVs, and trains.

  The company, which manufactures 8 million meters of fabric …

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• Warning Signs: Inside Travis Perkins’ Failed ERP Migration

  November 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When UK construction supplier and home improvement retailer Travis Perkins announced last month that it had selected Oracle Fusion Cloud’s Financials as the core of its new ERP deployment, it marked the latest in a long series of decisions about the company’s computing infrastructure. Unfortunately, it came after many poor decisions and failed ERP migrations along the way. Hopefully they will serve to educate others who might travel the same path.

  Travis Perkins’ current ERP woes began in 2016 at Infor’s annual Inforum user conference in New York City. The UK company’s then CEO, John Carter, announced that it …

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• A Preview Of The Comarch Cloud Calculator

  November 3, 2021 Tomasz Wachnicki

  For many IBM i shops, the cloud is a new consumption model and cloud-based applications and infrastructure is still a new way of doing things. If the cloud means anything, it means reducing the friction of buying and using capacity and moving from capital expenses that have to be amortized to utility-style consumption that does not have to be. But there are a lot of moving parts, and customers have to be aware of how these things plug together and how they are priced so they can reckon what their cloud bill will be each hour, day, week, month, and …

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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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• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

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