• Making Basic IT Services Great Again

  September 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The focus of the tech world has been squarely on generative AI since ChatGPT descended the golden staircase and entered our hearts and minds in late 2022. Since then, building GenAI apps and services has become the number one priority for businesses around the globe. Unfortunately, the GenAI fixation has come at the detriment of basic IT services, a recent IBM study suggests.

  The level of hype for generative AI the past two years has been off the chart. Not since the initial dot-com boom of the late 1990s has a new technology triggered such a tsunami of interest, some …

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• GenAI Interest ‘Exploding’ for Modernization on IBM i and Z, Kyndryl Says

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There’s been an explosion of interest in using generative AI on IBM i and System Z servers, according to Kyndryl’s latest report on mainframe modernization. Hybrid IT, security, the skills gap, and observability round out the top five trends impacting the IBM midrange and mainframe platforms.

  Last year, Kyndryl contracted with Coleman Parkes Research to survey about 500 senior IT leaders at IBM i and System Z mainframe shops around the world. That effort turned into the 2023 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey Report, which we covered here.

  Many of the same modernization trends that the former IBM Global …

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• Remain Bolsters Development Options with TD/OMS

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software recently rolled out a major upgrade to its change management software for IBM i. The big enhancements with TD/OMS 16.1 include the availability of Remain’s Web-based development framework, dubbed Octo, as well as support for the popular Web-based IDE, VS Code.

  Remain Software introduced Octo more than two years ago as a lightweight Web-based framework to unite its various IBM i offerings. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo was initially put forward as a way to integrate and display information from other Remain Software applications, such as TD/OMS, Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace, its lightweight, Web-based …

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• ISE Grows MSP Business With Maxava’s Monitor Mi8

  September 16, 2024 Ash Giddings

  Maxava, the global provider of innovative monitoring, high availability, and disaster recovery software and services solutions for the IBM i platform, announced today that Information Systems Engineering (ISE) is finding success using Maxava’s Mi8 to monitor its clients IBM i systems.

  ISE, which provides consulting, software, and managed services for IBM i clients, was founded in 1984. The company’s specialty is working with the Infor XA (MAPICS) line of ERP software. The company also owns Paper-Less, a manufacturing execution solution (MES). Experts in the IBM i, ISE employees have over 300 years of RPG programming experience and over 70 years …

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• COMMON to Kick Off First of Two Fall NAViGATE Shows

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  What’s better than having one fall COMMON conference to learn new IBM i skills and meet with other midrange folks? The answer, of course, is to hold two NAViGATE shows – one in sizzling Florida next week, followed by a second event in November in the cooler climate of Toronto, Ontario.

  The IBM i community will converge on the Gulf Coast of Florida next week for NAViGATE 2024 Bonita Springs, which is being held at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point from Monday September 16 through Wednesday September 18.

  Hundreds of attendees are expected at the fall COMMON conference next week, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 33

  September 9, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  We are back to the Quiet Time again in PTF Land, and we are beginning to wonder if the slowdown in patches has anything to do with the recent closures of the research and development labs by China, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. Probably not. But maybe.

  Fact is, there is not a lot going on this week, and thankfully no security vulnerabilities that we could see.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • RPG Café

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High

  …

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• Is It Worth Investing in IBM i and RPG?

  August 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is mistaking the IBM i server as a brand-new system. It can’t hide from its status as a legacy platform. But does that mean that it’s no longer worth investing in IBM i and RPG? That’s the focus of a new paper by the outsourcing company DDC FPO.

  DDC FPO is an Evergreen, Colorado-based business process outsourcing company that serves the trucking industry and specializes in things like freight billing and customer service for truckers. Considering the continued popularity of the IBM i server in the trucking business, it’s not surprising that DDC has taken an interest in the …

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• Getting A Handle On What GenAI Might Cost

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of my other day job at The Next Platform, I can give you a pretty good idea about what it costs to train an AI model or run inference against it once it is trained. But I have seen very little data that tries to give any of a sense of what it costs to add generative AI functionality to applications.

  But interestingly, Gartner analysts embedded some such data in a report about how it expected many GenAI projects to be abandoned by the end of 2025 after their proofs of concept fail. That so many PoCs will …

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• Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i

  August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.

  IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …

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• Untangling Legacy Spaghetti Code To Cook Up Microservices

  August 12, 2024 Michel Mouchon

  At this point in the history of programming, everyone pretty much knows what microservices are and everybody is more than acquainted with the legacy code – and often monolithic code – that has been created over decades by countless programmers who have evolved corporate applications to fit new conditions and new demands.

  It is often called spaghetti code, and for good reason. The code is often a tangled mess of business logic and data – presumably the data is the meatballs and the user interface is the sauce in this metaphor. (It is important to not take a metaphor too …

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