• Managed Cloud Saves Money By Cutting System And People Overprovisioning

  June 22, 2022 Ron Venzin

  For most IBM i shops in the world, a unit of compute, storage, or networking on a cloud or a unit of time for a skilled IT specialist is always going to cost more than what it costs to have such talent in house. And so, you would think, putting an IBM i system in the cloud and managing all aspects of that system will always cost companies more money, right?

  Wrong.

  Here’s the part of the math that people rarely do, and that we do each time we close another cloud and managed services deal for an IBM i …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

  April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin

  The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.

  This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …

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• IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …

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• Marketplace Study Shows How IBM i Language Use Evolves

  February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s no secret that RPG dominates development on the IBM i platform. SQL and Control Language (CL) are also heavily used in the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of IBM i shops. But what about other established languages, like Java and C++? What about newer open source languages, like PHP and Node.js? The recent HelpSystems Marketplace Study provides us a clue into language use.

  HelpSystems published its first IBM i Marketplace Study back in January 2016, reflecting data collected in late 2015 from 834 IBM i professionals around the world. One of the questions it has consistently asked is …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 3

  January 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of 2022 predictions. The third (and final) round of predictions kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has a very bright outlook for the year ahead in IBM i land.

  “As business confidence and optimism rallies, IT budgets will become less restrained,” Guarino tells IT Jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and enhanced legacy systems will experience modernization pressure. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding swift …

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• AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?

  December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?

  AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …

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• IBM i Developer Day This Week

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers of all stripes are welcome to IBM i Developer Day, a free virtual event that’s scheduled to take place next Friday, November 19, at 1 p.m. ET. Organized by Liam Allan, the event will feature a heavy dose of Visual Studio Code (Allan’s favorite IDE) plus discussions hosted by IBMers on the future of IBM i and its role in the cloud.

  The world of application development is moving fast, but many IBM i pros are still stuck in the past when it comes to the tools, technologies, and techniques they use. While RPG and COBOL development …

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• PHP Is Here To Stay: PHP 8 And Beyond

  November 1, 2021 Mike Pavlak

  In 2005, PHP ushered in the era of TRUE open source development on IBM i with version 5.3 of the language, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Zend and IBM Rochester. PHP had just gone through a major evolution and was taking the world by storm in the middle of the Version 5 phenomena.

  Many IBM i developers were rapidly wrapping their heads around this wildly popular scripting technology with code stored in IFS files and Db2 data popping up on pages running directly on IBM i. Nearly every website on the web that was not HTML had some flavor …

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• End of Life Looms for PHP 7.3

  October 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are running PHP version 7.3 have just over a month to upgrade to a newer version and avoid losing bug fixes and security fixes when 7.3 hits the end of life (EOL) on December 6. The good news is that PHP version 7.4 and 8.0 are stable and will be supported for some time. The not-so-good news is it appears a large number of IBM i shops are still running older releases of the PHP language.

  According to an informal poll conducted by Seiden Group last month, about half of the IBM i shops that participated in a …

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• Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …

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