• The Cloud’s Future Is So Bright, So Why Are You So Glum?

  August 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s tough not to be excited about the cloud, that amalgamation of servers that Gartner says will account for half of enterprise IT spending by 2025. The cloud is where the action is; it’s where everyone is headed. So what’s holding you back? The cloud, it turns out, is not so rosy for those without a clear path to get there.

  We’re in the steep part of the public cloud’s growth phase at the moment, thanks in part to COVID-19, which turbo-charged digital transformation projects, Gartner declared in a report earlier this year. The cloud’s growth comes at the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

  August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

  The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

  This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …

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• JD Edwards Customers Face Support Decisions

  August 3, 2022 Alex Woodie

  JD Edwards was the gold standard for ERP software on the IBM midrange server for many years. But with end-of-support dates looming from Oracle, many JD Edwards customers – especially users of the World package – must make some decisions about the future of their ERP system.

  In April, as it has planned for years, Oracle ceased providing premiere support for JD Edwards World, the older, RPG-based ERP package originally developed. This marks the first time in decades that the World product is not under mainstream support from its owner.

  However, the software giant will continue to honor extended support …

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• Altair Delivers More Options for Running SAS Code

  August 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies that have legacy SAS code for analytic applications running on IBM i servers and other platforms but don’t want to pay the SAS Institute for the runtime have another option from Altair, which recently acquired World Programming.

  SAS was the dominant language for analytics for decades, starting in the 1970s, when Jim Goodnight and his colleagues developed the language at North Carolina State University. Goodnight went on to found the SAS Institute, which provided runtime and support for the open SAS code and, in the process, became the dominant provider of SAS solutions.

  The SAS hegemony has only …

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• Guru: Regular Expressions, Part 1

  July 25, 2022 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I will show how to replace characters in a string using SQL and regular expressions. I know I can replace characters using RPG or SQL, and they work great, but there are some cases where I find using regular expressions is a bit easier.

  For the examples I’ll show, I’m using the REGEXP_REPLACE function. REGEXP_REPLACE allows me to search for a particular value within a string and replace it with another value.

  In the first example (Figure 1), I want to search a string that has both letters and digits and I want …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

  July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …

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• Merlin Development Framework Now Supports IBM i 7.3

  July 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has decided to support IBM i version 7.3 with Merlin, the new application development framework that was introduced in May as part of the IBM i 7.5 launch. The decision should help widen the potential user base for Merlin, even while discouraging operating system upgrades.

  Merlin is a new software package from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from IBM, Red Hat, …

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• Guild Mortgage Takes The 20-Year Option For Modernization

  June 27, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When Kurt Reheiser returned to the IBM i server after a 15-year hiatus away the platform, things weren’t a lot different than how he left them. “My skills were more relevant than I thought they would be,” the former RPG developer said during last month’s POWERUp 2022 conference. Now as the CIO of a multi-billion-dollar company called Guild Mortgage, Reheiser is overseeing a modernization initiative that will keep building on the company’s successful history of custom development on the IBM i platform.

  Reheiser shared his and his company’s IT journey during a keynote address at COMMON’s annual user conference …

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• 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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• Plotting A Middle Age Career Change To IBM i

  June 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Not many colleges teach the IBM i and RPG anymore, which makes it hard for midrange shops to replenish talent that way. But organizations have another resource they can tap for technical personnel: slightly more experienced individuals who are ready to start a second career. This is the path taken by Shelly Petty, who recently shared her story at the POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans.

  Petty spent 12 years working in the banking field before making her career change to IBM i. Her previous job was a high-stress position that required her to handle securities on behalf of corporate …

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