• IBM i Modernization – Life After RPG

  March 30, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  How an IBM i business approaches legacy application modernization doesn’t differ from application modernization on any other platform. Well, there is one slight difference. Many of those IBM i businesses have the added weight of replacing working legacy applications for the simple fact that RPG fell out of mainstream coding decades ago. The code is efficient and perfectly runs mission-critical apps, but there are fewer and fewer programmers around to maintain that code.

  Colleges and universities stopped teaching RPG before Y2K was even a concern. Developers that learned RPG in the 1980s and early 1990s were 30 or 40 years …

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• Inside Jack Henry’s Long-Term Modernization Roadmap

  March 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates is one of the stalwart brands for IBM i applications. The Monett, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 banks and credit unions running its core banking systems on IBM i, with another 650 on AIX and a few hundred more on Windows Server. So when the company last month officially unveiled its next-generation technology strategy, it turned a few heads.

  As it turns out, Jack Henry has been working on its new tech stack for the past five years. As the company sussed out the strategy and the first products were born – an application for …

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• Rocket Launches New DevOps Solution for IBM i

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week took the covers off a newly branded solution aimed at bringing IBM i development processes into the future. Dubbed Rocket DevOps, the offering is based on the existing Rocket Aldon offering and is designed to enable IBM i shops to adopt the latest CI/CD development and operations practices. The suite also will welcome a new testing solution next month.

  Rocket DevOps was created to be a soup-to-nuts DevOps solutions that gives development and delivery teams everything they need to develop and deploy high quality and secure IBM i code in an efficient manner. In addition to …

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• Remain Unifies Its Products with New Framework, Dubbed ‘Octo’

  March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Remain Software have been cranking out the code all winter, and the fruits of their labor are now here for all to view. Chief among the new deliverables is Octo, which the Dutch company describes as a Web-based orchestration layer and framework that will unite its various products and provide a common dashboard. Updates of other products, including the flagship TD/OMS offering, are now available, too.

  The headliner for Remain Software’s second milestone delivery of the current release cycle (which spans from summer to summer) arguably is Octo. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo …

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• Git Is A Whole Lot More Than A Code Repository

  March 16, 2022 Jeff Tickner

  It is funny to think that two of the most transformative technologies to hit the datacenter in the past several decades are based on projects created by Linus Torvalds. The first, of course, is the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Linux operating system and which first rolled out in 1991 but didn’t become a real server-class platform until the Dot Com Boom in the late 1990s. The second thing that Torvalds created, out of necessity to help better manage the development and patching of the open source Linux kernel, was the Git repository and version control system. …

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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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• SrinSoft CEO Ram Hari’s Long Road on IBM i

  February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Ram Hari has had the sort of IT career that many dream of. Hired in the late 1990s as a Y2K programmer, the India native climbed the corporate IT ranks, and today runs his own 500-person consulting company called SrinSoft. The New York City-based company offers a range of IT services, but with interest in IBM i modernization and migrations spiking during COVID, Hari is finding it hard to satisfy demand.

  Hari’s career started in 1995, soon after earning an undergraduate degree in computer science and electric engineering from a university in India. After getting his RPG certification, he was …

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• Is COBOL on IBM i Experiencing a Renaissance?

  January 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  There is no doubt that RPG is the dominant language when it comes to IBM i development. But there are some indications that more interest in COBOL may be brewing in IBM i circles, particularly among customers of a certain size and industry segment.

  COBOL has been on the mind of Dan Magid, the CEO of data integration software developer Eradani. That will happen when large banks come out of the blue and ask you to support COBOL in your product, which Eradani did with its data integration middleware for IBM i.

  “What’s been interesting for us is, we …

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• Four Signs That Point to More IBM i Modernization in ’22

  January 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are under the gun to do something about their aging applications, perhaps more so than any other group of computer users out there, save for System z mainframe shops. Here are four factors that increase the odds that more IBM i shops will embark upon modernization efforts and start updating those heritage applications and databases in the new year.

  1. The White-Hot Economy

  Increased consumer spending is likely to continue in early 2022, thanks in part to the strong recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented financial support provided from the government. The economy is running white …

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