• Rocket Software Supports IBM i with New Data Intelligence Offering

  June 21, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve probably seen it before: Two departments in the same company have different numbers in their BI reports, when the numbers should be the same. Tracking down these data discrepancies can be very difficult, especially when they touch systems like IBM i or System z mainframes. But with a new release of its Data Intelligence offering, Rocket Software thinks it has found a simpler way.

  Rocket Software has been selling its Data Intelligence product since it obtained it with its ASG Technologies acquisition back in 2021. The software was designed to help organizations track down data problems that surface as …

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• IBM Introduces watsonx for Governed Analytics, AI

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At its annual Think conference last week, IBM took the wraps off watsonx, a new platform for crunching big data and developing AI and machine learning applications in a safe and governed environment.

  You don’t need an industry analyst to tell you that artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the sun this year. Thanks to the public launch of ChatGPT in late last year, regular citizens (as opposed to AI experts and industry analyst) have become aware of the vast potential of large language models (LLMs) that can mimic humans in very convincing ways.

  While LLMs like ChatGPT …

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• Finding IBM i’s Place In Data Fabrics And Data Meshes

  December 5, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The commercialization of the Internet kicked off an unpredictable series of developments in the computing world. One of those is the proliferation of Web applications, each with its own data silo, bringing chaos to data management and data governance. Application architects are now seeking to tame that data chaos through novel infrastructure architectures, including the data mesh and the data fabric.

  While the lure of digital transformation gives companies hope that they, too, can benefit from breakthroughs in analytics, machine learning, and IoT, the data at most companies is in such a state of mess that in most cases it’s …

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• Data Is Streaming Into The Cloud, Including From IBM i

  November 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We are in the midst of a vast migration of data into public clouds, as companies seek to leverage technological innovation occurring in the cloud for competitive advantage. While there are no IBM i runtimes in the public cloud yet, IBM i shops are still getting value by moving their valuable Db2 for i data into the cloud, often using streaming technologies and tools like Apache Kafka and Apache Camel, as well as an updated ETL offering from IBM.

  It is tough to understate the magnitude of the transition to the public cloud is having on the $4 trillion IT …

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• Kyndryl Wants to Connect Your IBM i to Microsoft Azure

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Kyndryl, the former IBM division known as Global Technology Services (GTS), last week unveiled an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will see it helping IBM i and System z customers integrate their applications and data with Microsoft Azure, specifically its low-code, no-code development platform called Power.

  Kyndryl’s alliance with Microsoft will make it easier for companies to leverage the valuable data and business logic contained in their midrange and mainframe assets as they develop new applications in the Microsoft Power Platform, which is a low-code, no-code development environment.

  “Basically, it provides a low-code, no-code environment in Azure for programmers,” …

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• IBM Mulls Using DataMigrator as Cloud Warehouse Pipeline

  June 29, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBMers are playing around with an update to a little-known ETL tool called DataMigrator for i that would make it easier for IBM i shops to move transactional data to cloud-based data warehousing platforms. The update would use Apache Kafka for the final connection to the cloud.

  DataMigrator ETL Extension, as the product is formally known, is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool created by IBM back in 2015. The product was developed to work with Db2 Web Query, the Java-based business intelligence tool that it OEMed from Information Builders (now owned by TIBCO).

  DataMigrator for …

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• 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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• In Search of Multi-Modal Data Integration

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the number of data sources that companies use goes up, so too does the complexity of the data pipelines that bring it all together. Instead of using a mix of different tools and technologies for ETL, ELT, and batch integration, some users are seeking a single multi-modal data integration tool that can deliver multiple integration approaches.

  One company providing multi-modal data integration is Equalum. The company’s DataOps offering works in various methodologies, including capturing real-time database updates using change data capture (CDC) technology; batch-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) and ELT; and REST- and SOAP-based data integration using …

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• Matillion Founder Recounts Midrange Roots

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the mad rush to build data warehouses in the cloud, there’s one group that’s doing surprisingly well: ETL tool providers. Despite the sophistication of today’s AI and analytic endeavors, ETL tools are a critical link in the chain to the cloud. And one of the up-and-coming vendors in this space is Matillion, which last week raised $100 million in venture capital.

  Matillion was founded in 2011 to help companies build cloud data warehouses. The Anglo-American firm developed expertise in taking companies’ corporate data from on-premise systems and building data warehouse on emerging cloud systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ …

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• M81 Speeds Backups with Flash for i

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  M81, a French independent software vendor (ISV) that develops IBM i software, recently announced a new release of Flash for i, a utility that uses IBM FlashCopy and EMC SnapShot technology to clone an IBM i disk volume in just two minutes. With version 4.0 out the door and a new partnership with an American company, M81 is looking to expands its operations in the United States.

  Flash for i is an innovative utility designed to provide an IBM i-centric way to manage the FlashCopy and Snapshot commands that IBM and Dell EMC bring to the table with their enterprise …

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