• 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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• Eradani Brings COBOL Into Its Microservices World

  January 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i customers who need to connect their COBOL applications to Web services and APIs may want to check out Eradani, which is in the process of rolling out an update aimed at COBOL code. In the process of updating Eradani Connect, the company strengthened its entire platform, which will benefit RPG shops, too.

  Eradani Connect was designed to make it easy to connect IBM i applications to external APIs in a bi-directional manner. With its native wrap-around code for IBM i, the software allows customers to expose their existing applications using REST protocols and JSON data structures, thereby providing …

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• IBM i Community Predictions for 2022, Part 2

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The new year is upon us, which means it’s time for predictions. We continue where we left off on Monday with our second installment of predictions from the IBM i community.

  The way Fresche Solutions Chief Product Officer Marcel Sarrasin sees it, 2022 will be a period of heightened competition in the business jungle.

  “Technology advancements and changing markets will drive new competitive threats in 2022, creating the urgent need for new digital solutions to help companies thrive, survive and grow,” Sarrasin says. “Focus will be on new IT products and applications that will deliver improved business processes, pave the …

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• The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.

  There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 1

  January 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  While the month and year ostensibly are just values in the date field, when the calendar flips over from December to January, things feel different. There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism for what the new year will bring. Coming off another calamitous year filled with COVID-19, perhaps it’s we need that even more so this year.

  It has become an IT Jungle tradition to ask members of the IBM i community at the start of the year for their predictions. This year is no different, and so we’ll kick off the first part of our (most likely) two-part …

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• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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