• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

  Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …

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• SEA Adapts Messaging App For MSPs

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing workloads and applications, managed service providers (MSP) have a unique set of requirements. Due to these requirements, MSPs that run IBM i workloads often end up building their own systems management and monitoring software. With a new release of its message management software, Software Engineering of America (SEA) now has an out-of-the-box solution for MSPs.

  Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady uptick of interest in private cloud environments hosted by MSPs. In the IBM i space, there are now dozens of MSPs operating in the market, including many former IBM business partners …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 23

  January 23, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  While most of us are still transitioning into the New Year, according to Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO, Big Blue is already a company of the future. After heavily investing in the future in the recent past, Rometty says it is now time for consistent performance. You can watch her entire discussion about what’s to come for IBM and tech in general in 2019 at the first link below. Here in the Jungle, the New Year brought new life to some old tech tips in the most recent of Four Hundred Guru Classic. Find the link to the latest issue …

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• The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

  January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …

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• Infor Raises $1.5 Billion, Teases An IPO

  January 21, 2019 Alex Woodie

  When will Infor go public? For years, the company has hinted that an initial public offering (IPO) of stock is in its future, but has remained mum on the exact timing. Last week, as part of an announcement regarding a $1.5 billion investment by private equity firms, the ERP software company finally came clean and solidified its public stock offering plans to the world.

  The IPO will come in 2019, the New York company says. Or maybe 2020. It all depends, according to Infor, on “market conditions.”

  With stocks last week, major indices are still flirting with correction territory, and …

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• As I See It: The Challenge To Selfhood

  January 21, 2019 Victor Rozek

  By almost any measure, it was one of the biggest news stories in last hundred years. And I’ll bet you missed it. In fairness, almost everyone did. After all, there was nothing entertaining or scandalous about it, so it failed to meet the current criteria of news worthiness. Plus, it dealt with concepts not easily collapsed into sound bites. It was loaded with strange, off-putting words like Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes, and alien goings-on such as Endosymbiosis, and Molecular Phylogenetics.

  Too complex for Twitter, too impersonal for Facebook. So, almost everyone missed it – at least those of us outside the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 2

  January 21, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  I feel a bit like I am having a small flashback to the Year 2000 software bug, but the trip is a little different but still involves the warping of time. As you see in IBM support bulletin MA47217, the Service Action Log within the Hardware Service Manager can’t seem to get over 2018. Literally. If you try to put either “2019” or “2020” in the From or To year fields, it flies up into its own black hole. This doesn’t appear to be affecting any other areas of Service Tools, or logging – so far.

  Here’s the precise …

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• Guru Classic: Automatic Or Static Storage?

  January 16, 2019 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published in August 2008. One thing that has changed in the intervening 10-plus years is that I find a lot more RPGers regularly using subprocedures now. Something that hasn’t really changed much is that many of those using subprocedures still don’t fully understand the behavioral differences between automatic and static storage. The concepts and handling of automatic versus static storage haven’t really changed. So the only modifications I’ve made for this reprise of the tip is to update the style of the code example.

  If you write RPG subprocedures, you should know about the …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs – %SCAN and %CHECK

  January 16, 2019 Jon Paris

  Many RPG programmers seem to get confused about the usage and operation of a number of built-in functions (BIFs). In particular the BIFs %XLATE, %REPLACE, %SCAN, and %CHECK seem to cause a lot of confusion. In this tip, I focus on %CHECK and %SCAN. I decided to re-visit this particular tip because of the recent introduction of %SCAN’s companion BIF %SCANR and a related enhancement to %SCAN itself. More on this later.

  The %SCAN BIF has been with us since V3R7, when it was introduced along with %EDITC and %EDITW, to improve string handling. %CHECK, on the other hand, is …

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