• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 3

  January 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of 2022 predictions. The third (and final) round of predictions kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has a very bright outlook for the year ahead in IBM i land.

  “As business confidence and optimism rallies, IT budgets will become less restrained,” Guarino tells IT Jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and enhanced legacy systems will experience modernization pressure. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding swift …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Building Organizational Resilience in the Digital Age

  January 17, 2022 Maxime Leclair

  There is so much change happening in the world and technology is playing a critical role. Organizations must use modern digital solutions if they want to survive and thrive amid uncertainty and accelerate growth in an aggressively competitive business landscape.

  Climate change, COVID-19, global and financial crises, among other things, have exposed vulnerabilities in businesses and accelerated the need for new digital capabilities, modern systems, and processes as well as optimized and transformed legacy systems. According to research, 63 percent of organizations flag digital transformation, including building up technological infrastructure and data analytics as top strategic priorities for the …

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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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• Thoroughly Modern: Time To Develop Your IBM i HA/DR Plan For 2022

  December 6, 2021 Josh Osborne

  Disasters and unplanned downtime can hit any company at any time – regardless of where its applications or data sits. Establishing a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) plan is paramount to getting your mission critical IBM i applications and your business back up and running – fast!

  2021 saw its fair share of challenges. Everything from bush fires to earthquakes to flash floods, and the continuation of the pandemic. And, those are just the ones mother nature sent our way. The manmade risks in the form of cyberattacks and ransomware also grew exponentially in 2021. With over 30,000 security …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Infrastructure Challenges And Easing Into The Cloud

  November 8, 2021 Marcel Sarrasin

  There is an old saying, purportedly a Chinese curse but never proven to be anything but a saying by English diplomats who interfaced with the Middle Kingdom: “May you live in interesting times.” There is an equally mistaken etymology that the word for “crisis” in Chinese is comprised of two Mandarin words for “danger” and “opportunity.”

  Even though people misunderstand the source of these sayings, and the latter one is just simply not true at all, it is still the case that there has never been a more interesting time in the information technology sector in general and …

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• Planning A Modernization Project? Read This First

  October 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Modernization means a lot of things to a lot of people. If you happen to ask Chris Koppe, the senior vice president of strategy, transformation, and modernization services at Fresche Solutions, what modernization means to him, get ready to spend the next hour listening to his response.

  That’s the approximate length of Koppe’s recent presentation at the POWERUp conference, titled Developing Your Modernization Plan: What Are Your Options? and it’s worth every second. Koppe explored the topic in such breadth and depth that we though it was worth highlighting his main points. Of course, if you’re a COMMON member and …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Talking IBM i System Management With Abacus

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want the members of your IT department to focus on the core applications that define, run, and improve your business, and they also have to manage your systems, and you have limited budgets to do it all, you have to learn to let go of something. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many people to do the work. Something has to give, and you have to keep what brings the real value.

  Having an IBM i platform provides plenty of value to start, as IBM …

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• Fresche Buys Abacus To Integrate From IBM i To Cloud To Code

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest provider of application development and modernization tools for the IBM i platform and its predecessors, acquired Abacus Solutions, a long-time provider of cloud and managed services for the same market, giving a new meaning to the word integration in the IBM i brand. Now, with the combination of Fresche and Abacus, we can add an adverb to the intransitive form of the verb: vertically integrated.

  Vertical integration is all the rage these days, at least among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that consume half of the IT gear in the world and …

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• Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …

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