• Book A Date With Your DR Plan

  July 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Chances are, you’ve been through a lot in the past year, from a personal, a professional, and a public health perspective. Your company’s IT estate has probably gone through some changes, too. To keep your IBM i and open systems resilient and able to withstand misfortune, it’s a good idea to revisit your disaster recovery plan to make sure it reflects current reality.

  During COMMON’s recent NAViGATE event, IBM i DR expert Richard Dolewski provided a great description of why it’s so important to check your DR plan now. With so much turmoil caused by COVID, it’s simply too …

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• So You Want To Do Containerized Microservices In the Cloud?

  June 30, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As a modernization consultant working in IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, lab, Amy Anderson gets to hear from some of the most tech-savvy IBM i shops in the world. Her job requires her to know where shops are now, listen to where they want to go, and chart a path that takes them there. That can sometimes be quite a challenge, especially considering the rapid pace of technological change at the moment.

  “One of the things that we’re seeing now is the whole industry now is focused on modernization,” Anderson said during her session at the recent NAViGATE conference hosted by COMMON …

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• In Search Of Next Gen IBM i Apps

  June 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What will become of our RPG and COBOL applications? If IBM i chief architect Steve Will has his way, the core elements of them will evolve into what he calls “next gen” applications that can run in the cloud, if necessary.

  “We are not just focusing anymore on trying to help clients get past green screens to mobile interfaces or Web interfaces,” Will said during his recent COMMON NAViGATE session, titled IBM i PLUS Cloud is the Answer. “There are still clients and applications that need to get there. We understand that. But you can’t just stop there now. …

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• IBM i Business Bucks The COVID Trend, Will Says

  June 21, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The COVID pandemic has slammed American business and the American economy in many different ways, and it has taken its toll on server sales. But according to Steve Will, the IBM i chief architect, sales of IBM i systems have grown over the past three quarters. In response, IBM has enabled Rochester to go on a bit of a hiring spree to bolster the IBM i development team.

  “The IBM i business in 2021 is actually quite strong,” Will said during his presentation at the NAViGATE conference that COMMON held the week of May 24. “We had a very down …

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• A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning

  May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.

  This is …

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• COMMON Heads To Ohio With Hybrid NAViGATE Event

  May 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  COMMON this week is welcoming members back to its first in-person event in over a year. The physical fun will commence in Columbus, Ohio, where it will hold its NAViGATE conference for both in-person and online attendees this Monday through Wednesday.

  More than 250 sessions will be presented by 100-plus IBM i experts during COMMON’s three-day show. Each session will take place live (as opposed to being pre-recorded, which became quite common during COVID-19) and will be available to folks who travelled to the Columbus venues as well as to people logging in over the Internet.

  The NAViGATE schedule …

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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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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 10

  March 10, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  The plan is on the table. IBM has released its annual report, which is accompanied by a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna expressing his confidence in IBM’s future as a hybrid cloud and AI platform company. Of course, this plan isn’t a surprise as we have monitored IBM’s laser focus on the hybrid cloud that has intensified since Krishna took the help almost one year ago, but there is lots of interesting information about IBM’s the path IBM is paving and the strategies to get where it wants to go that you can access from the link in the Top …

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• IBM i Groups Cautiously Adding In-Person Events To Schedules

  February 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus reared its nasty head in the United States, shutting down large swaths of the economy and forcing hundreds of millions of people to shelter at home, there is the hint of a glimpse of a ray of sunshine: The possible return of in-person events in the IBM i community. Maybe, anyway. Or maybe not.

  While nothing is certain in these unprecedented, topsy-turvy times, it appears that several IBM i groups are planning to host physical events where actual humans will be allowed to congregate with other humans for the purpose of learning about …

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