• Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z

  July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Izzi Software today announced the acquisition of CNX Corp., owner of the Valence suite of Web development tools for IBM i. The deal is the first IBM i-related acquisition for Izzi, which was founded last year with a mandate to buy smaller IBM i and mainframe vendors that typically don’t get M&A attention from bigger players.

  CNX is a Chicago-based software vendor and consulting firm founded in 1996 by Richard Milone and Robert Swanson. The two had worked with BPCS (now Infor ERP LX) customers, and developed a product that extended that ERP system to the Web. That product, then …

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• IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.

  At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)

  Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …

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• Eradani Taps GenAI for IBM i Integration Boost

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Eradani introduced a new product last month that uses the power of generative AI to simplify the development of code for integration projects involving IBM i. The company says the new product, dubbed Eradani Assist, will allow customers to use natural language to tell the product to build specific application and data integrations, and the product will leverage one or more large language models (LLMs) to generate the integration code.

  Eradani calls its flagship product, Eradani Connect, an “integration hub” that manages communication into and out of the IBM i platform. The software supports application and data integration projects that …

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• GenAI Is Now Creating Malware Delivery Vehicles

  September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As if the threat posed by human bad actors wasn’t enough to admins up at night, security professionals are now tasked with preparing defenses for AI actors, including malware created by generative AI. That’s the takeaway from a new report published this month by HP that documents GenAI-generated malware. IBM i security professionals should take note.

  The September 2024 edition of the HP Wolf Security Threat Insights Report brought some concerning news around GenAI. While the HP Wolf Security team had seen convincing phishing lures created by GenAI, it hadn’t seen any actual malicious code written by GenAI before.

  But …

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• April Showers Bring May IBM i Security Vulnerabilities

  May 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched more than a dozen security flaws in IBM i and related products this spring, including serious flaws in the operating system proper and the compilers, and a critical vulnerability in Administrative Runtime Expert that landed a nearly perfect CVSS Base score.

  In the interest of time, let’s cover the security vulnerabilities in descending order of severity. That means we’re starting with the worst and then moving on to the slightly less worse.

  ARE Flaw

  The flaw reported in the Administration Runtime Expert for i (ARE), which IBM launched in 2010 to make it easier to manage IBM …

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• More Db2 Web Query Alternatives, And An Update

  March 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It has been five months since IBM abruptly killed off Db2 Web Query, the IBM i-based suite of business intelligence tools that Big Blue OEMed from Information Builders. Some customers have already settled on a replacement, but many others are still combing the market looking for a good fit.

  The product that is arguably the most well-positioned to replace Db2 Web Query is WebFOCUS, the Information Builders product on which Db2 Web Query is based. IBM had an OEM agreement with the New York-based company for more 15 years before it abruptly ended in October.

  IT Jungle has asked Information …

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• Rocket Launches CM-Kit for Continuous Modernization

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve read about continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI-CD. Now Rocket Software wants you think about a related topic called continuous modernization, which refers to an uninterrupted re-invention of your applications via Web enablement and APIs. It recently launched a new suite of software, called the Continuous Modernization Kit, to help customers deliver that on their IBM i servers.

  Web-enablement of greenscreen 5250 applications has been a thing since at least the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom drove the initial commercialization of the Internet. That was followed closely by mobile enablement, which Apple turbocharged with its 2007 launch …

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• Eradani Lays Waste to API Payload Restrictions

  November 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Eradani Connect customers who need to pass large amounts of data to IBM i via external API calls have often been stymied by a built-in restriction in IBM i that limits their payload to a mere 16MB. Those customers will be thrilled that Eradani has launched a new big data connector that smashes those payload restrictions to smithereens.

  Eradani Connect is a packaged application designed to simplify the creation and execution of API calls on IBM i. The software functions as a middleware layer that makes it easy for .NET, JavaScript, and Python developers to get access to the IBM …

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• Fall 2023 IBM i Tech Refresh Brings Something For Everyone

  October 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its fall Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i, with updates starting to become available on November 17. IBM announced no new products as part of the fall 2023 TR cycle, but it did spread the love around by giving just about everybody something to cheer about in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9.

  Lots of different products that make up the IBM i environment will see some pretty meaningful enhancements with this release. If you spend a lot of time in Navigator for i or ACS, you will see new stuff. We haven’t had …

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• Eradani Debuts DevOps Suite for IBM i

  October 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s been five years since Dan Magid, the former CEO of Aldon and an executive with Rocket Software, has been involved in the IBM i change management and DevOps business. But with next week’s launch of Eradani DevOps at COMMON’s NAViGATE conference, the longtime change management expert is getting back into the game. This time, however, Magid is taking a decidedly different approach.

  What makes Eradani DevOps stand out from other change management tools on IBM i is its focus on open source tools. The folks at Eradani have realized that application developers in the mainstream IT world have pretty …

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