• HelpSystems Goes Phishing For Cyber Threat Hunter

  October 25, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems dipped into the security pond again with its acquisition last week of PhishLabs, a Canadian company that develops technology designed to protect organizations from various Internet-based threats, including malicious emails, account takeover, and data leakage. As is the case with most of HelpSystems’ acquisitions, its IBM i customer are expected to be among the beneficiaries.

  For over a decade, PhishLabs has been developing a security platform designed to find and identify and counteract threats to customers. As its name suggests, the company got its start with identifying phishing attacks. Its founder and chief technology officer, John LaCour, grew frustrated …

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• We Need You To Take The 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe that it is actually 2021, and it is even harder to believe that we are in the final weeks of the 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey. This is the eighth annual survey, which takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.

  As you well know, the community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior as well as that of big third-party hardware, software, and services providers. Believe it or not, Big Blue is more open about receiving …

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• Security Vendor Shopping Spree Continues for HelpSystems

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems quietly nabbed two more security software vendors last month, Agari and Beyond Security, just days after it brought on a new investor, a private equity firm called Harvest Partners Structured Capital.

  The deal to bring in Harvest Partners SCF, LP was announced on May 6, when HelpSystems announced that a definitive agreement has been signed for HP SCF to take a minority stake in the company, joining existing investors TA Associates, Charlesbank Capital Partners, HGGC, and HelpSystems employees.

  HP SCF principal Chris Peyser, who will take a place on HelpSystems board, lauded the Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company for its …

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• Ransomware Epidemic Hits Epic Proportions, And IBM i Shops Take Notice

  May 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The ransomware outbreak hit home for millions of Americans last week when attackers shut down a major East Coast pipeline as well as a hospital network on the West Coast. For IBM i shops, the events are a potent reminder to re-evaluate network security and data protection systems to ensure they’re resilient from attack.

  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of Mr. Robot last week as news spread of the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline network, which provides 45 percent of the gasoline for the entire East Coast of the United States through 5,500 miles of …

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• New IBM i Events Spin Up In May

  April 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Last year, the coronavirus pandemic devastated tech conferences, those multi-day affairs that brought computing communities together and that resulted in a lot of cheese being eaten and coffee being dranken. So it’s big news that COMMON will be holding its first in-person event in over a year in May with its NAViGATE 2021 conference. But before then, HelpSystems will be holding its inaugural BuildIt event next week.

  HelpSystems’ BuildIT conference will take place May 4 through 6. It will be an online-only affair, and feature more than 40 sessions covering a range of IT topics. Much of the event …

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• 3 Takeaways from the 2021 PowerTech Security Report

  April 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  PowerTech tomorrow will officially release its report on the state of IBM i security, which will be the 18th straight year it has published aggregated data collected from security scans of actual IBM i machines. We caught up with the report’s author, HelpSystems Director of Security Technologies Robin Tatam, for a quick preview.

  Tatam and Sandi Moore, HelpSystems principal security consultant, will share the full results of the PowerTech security study in two webinars tomorrow, including one at 8 a.m. CT and another at noon CT. You can find more information about these free events and register to attend at …

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• Tape Popularity Increases in IBM i Land

  March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With all of the disaster recovery options available to IBM i shops these days — virtual tape libraries, hardware- and software-based high availability, and backups to the cloud — it may be surprising to learn that customers are still installing tape drives in large numbers.

  According to the recent HelpSystems’ Marketplace survey, 54 percent of respondents say they rely on tape as one of their ways to recover from a disaster. That was up 6 percent from the previous year’s study. It was also the highest figure for tape since the very first year the company conducted the survey, …

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• ‘Alarming’ Security Gaps Exposed in IBM i Marketplace Report

  February 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve ever met Ian Jarman, you’d know that the IBM Power Systems business unit executive for IBM Lab Services is not a man who gets easily excited. So when the longtime IBM Rochester executive said he was “alarmed” by the decided lack of basic security precautions in IBM i shops during the recent webinar to discuss the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Report, you might get the sense that something is quite wrong.

  Once again, security was at the top of the list of top concerns of IBM i shops in HelpSystems’ annual survey and report, which is now …

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• The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

  This history continues, and is …

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• Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.

  It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …

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