• Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …

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• Do The Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting For Cost Savings

  April 5, 2021 Matt Paterini

  COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

  “Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in …

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• Matillion Founder Recounts Midrange Roots

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the mad rush to build data warehouses in the cloud, there’s one group that’s doing surprisingly well: ETL tool providers. Despite the sophistication of today’s AI and analytic endeavors, ETL tools are a critical link in the chain to the cloud. And one of the up-and-coming vendors in this space is Matillion, which last week raised $100 million in venture capital.

  Matillion was founded in 2011 to help companies build cloud data warehouses. The Anglo-American firm developed expertise in taking companies’ corporate data from on-premise systems and building data warehouse on emerging cloud systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ …

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• It’s Time For An Application Healthcheck

  January 25, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  When you get to a certain age – or, perhaps more generously, to a certain level of maturity – it is a good idea to have a health checkup at least once a year to see how your body is holding up and what can be done to deal with any problems that have arisen.

  IBM i applications have the same issues as people, as does all software running on any platform – although software is a bit different in that it can be replaced, renewed, rewritten, refurbished or simply left to rot in its swamp of technical debt.

  Every …

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• ARCAD Plugs IBM i DevOps Suite Into Microsoft Azure

  January 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers can now leverage a collection of DevOps tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, courtesy of a new integration announced in December 2020 by ARCAD Software.

  Azure DevOps is an end-to-end DevOps environment that provides a range of project management services for developers who are building software to deploy on Azure or other platforms.

  Microsoft ostensibly introduced the software as a service (SaaS) offering back in October 2018. But in reality, Azure DevOps is the latest name of a product that can trace its lineage back to 2006, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Team System.

  Through its …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i, Part 1

  January 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With an eventful 2020 thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start thinking about what 2021 might have in store for us. The IBM i community, like most of the world, could use a little bit of hope at the moment. We asked IBM i community leaders to deliver predictions, and they responded.

  Liam Allan, who is a consultant at Seiden Group and the creator of ILE Editor, has a couple of predictions for IT Jungle.

  “My focus is mainly software. I do still predict Node.js gaining traction on IBM i,” Allan writes. “The tooling is really …

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• How IBM i Fits Into the Evolving ERP Market

  November 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i remains a solid platform on which to run an ERP system. But with the shift to the cloud, not to mention a surge in homegrown application development on IBM i, the platform’s future for packaged ERP deployments is uncertain.

  The IBM midrange platform has a rich history of packaged ERP applications for a range of business types. From discrete manufacturing and trucking to banking and healthcare management, software vendors have targeted the IBM i platform and its predecessors to run integrated ERP systems and other similar types of business applications for over decades.

  But the go-go ERP deployments …

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• Thoroughly Modern: A Wealth Of Funding Options Makes It Easier To Take On Modernization

  November 9, 2020 Jeff Lovette

  Investment in IT is being driven by a new conversation – the value-aligned technology stack. The pandemic/recession is triggering the need for coordinated, business-led technology strategies that bring costs under control and harvest more value from technology to transform the business. Even before the events of 2020 began to play out, it wasn’t always easy to get funding for key IT initiatives, and now, as the world tries to come to grips with our new reality, it may seem even tougher. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

  From a business sense, three key notions stand out from our …

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• What’s the Deal? Battling the ‘L’ Word

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to read or write about the IBM i server or its big brother, the System z mainframe, without seeing the word “legacy” bandied about. These business systems have stood the test of time, providing value for millions of organizations, and the reward for that amazing longevity is to be called old and out of date. What’s the deal?

  We have searched for other terms to replace legacy, as if the word itself is the problem. Calling these “heritage” systems is one way people have tried to avoid the stigma associated with the “L” word (we’ve have even tried …

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• ARCAD Generates APIs From 5250 Screens

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops want to modernize their 5250 applications by developing REST-based Web services and API extensions, but they face difficulties getting started. These organizations may want to check out ARCAD Software’s latest offering, ARCAD API, which takes much of the pain and complexity out of the API generation process.

  REST-based APIs have become a standard method for exposing data and business logic to the outside world. There’s an abundance of ways that APIs can be used–pushing data to Web or mobile users, for example, or pulling data from a cloud-based CRM system. Just about any higher-level application function, …

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