• COVID-19 Tracking Comes to iSeries Central

  August 31, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Companies that use IBM i time and attendance software from UKG (formerly known as Kronos) got a nice surprise from the vendor earlier this year: A free reporting template that helps them perform contact tracing in the event that a worker comes down with COVID-19.

  As a developer of time and attendance software, UKG (which stands for Ultimate Kronos Group following Kronos’ merger with Ultimate Software earlier this year) is to build tools that track when and where an employee has worked. As it turns out, that’s just the sort of data that public health officials need when conducting …

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• New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.

  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …

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• You’re Only As Old As The Applications You Feel

  June 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You didn’t actually think that we would have forgotten that Sunday, June 21^st, was the 32^nd birthday of the Application System/400, did you? Of course we didn’t forget.

  It was also Father’s Day and the first day of summer, and to be perfectly frank (Soltis), I got a new smoker from my wife and I spent the afternoon learning about the joys of hickory smoked barbeque ribs. It is a gift that just keeps giving, because I made about 40 pounds of meat in various kinds and flavors because I needed to try everything all at once. …

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• The End is Near for Zend Server Basic PHP

  May 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Zend Server Basic, the free PHP runtime used by thousands of IBM i shops, will cease being offered starting in July 2021. That’s the word from Perforce, the company that now owns Zend and its lineup of PHP tools and technologies. The replacement, of course, is the new community edition of PHP that became available via RPM in late 2019.

  Starting in 2006, Zend Technology began to develop a special version of its PHP runtime for IBM i, which was then called i5/OS. This offering, dubbed Zend Core for i5/OS, provided a familiar way for users of the iSeries server …

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• Where Is IBM i?

  May 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve worked with the IBM i platform for any length of time, you realize that it can be hard to find. That’s true in the field, where companies sometimes aren’t even aware their applications are running on an IBM i system. But it’s also true when it comes to IBM’s own website, where you’d think i might be easier to find.

  Finding the IBM i homepage by navigating IBM’s website (www.ibm.com) is a bit like searching for the bathroom in the mall by walking the entire length of every floor. You know it has to be there. …

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• Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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• The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

  I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …

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• Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s hard to believe, but when January rolls around, we will start publishing the 30th volume of The Four Hundred. This is a long time to do anything, and many editors have come and gone with this publication over the years – some down other career paths, others being stopped in their tracks on this path and leaving this world too early. We are honored to have worked with them all and to do the work of serving the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i community, and we carry on this work in their honor.

  This time …

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