• The IT Balancing Act

  May 1, 2023 Bill Langston

  Medical research suggests that how well you can maintain your balance is a powerful predictor of your longevity. Balance is also a good indicator of longevity for your IBM i environment. The challenge is striking the right balance between “vertical” technology that helps your company work efficiently and accurately, and “horizontal” technology that reduces risk.

  Over the past few years, unprecedented forces shifted IT priorities and may have knocked your company’s IBM i environment off balance.

  Enabling IT Balance

  IBM i exists because of how well it runs complex business applications and manages data. We take for granted that the …

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• Pledging Backup Assurances in an Unsure World

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies are facing increasingly threats to their backups these days. Whether it’s ransomware attacks, migrations to the cloud, or random hardware failures, the possibility of corrupted data looms as big as ever. With World Backup Day taking place tomorrow (March 31), it makes sense to check out the state of backups on IBM i.

  The first thing to know is that backup plans appear to be changing at many companies, or at least the mechanism they use to execute the backup. From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of IBM i shops using tape to backup and recover data dropped from …

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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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• 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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• Cobalt Iron Supports Multiple LPARs with VTL

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops will be able to back up multiple LPARs to an individual virtual tape library (VTL) from Cobalt Iron, the company announced recently. The new capability overcomes a limitation that has existed since the company started to support IBM i with its data protection service a couple of years ago.

  Cobalt Iron is a Lawrence, Kansas-based provider of enterprise data protection services. The company’s flagship offering, called Compass, provides backup, recovery, and related services for or all major computer platforms, including servers running on-prem, virtualized environments, and systems and applications running in clouds.

  Some of Cobalt Iron’s customers …

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• Syncsort Expands IBM i Integration with ServiceNow

  October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to take full advantage of cloud-based IT management services may be interested in hearing about a new offering unveiled by Syncsort last week. With the new release of its Ironstream for ServiceNow product, Syncsort is making it easier for companies to push IBM i and mainframe event data into ServiceNow Event Management.

  ServiceNow has made its mark in the burgeoning fields of IT service management and AIOps. With $2.6 billion in revenue and more than, 5,000 software as a service (SaaS) subscribers, the publicly traded firm (NYSE: NOW) helps companies manage their increasingly complex IT …

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• VAI Keeps Rolling with ERP Update, Cloud and SaaS Sales

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Scintillating growth” may not be the best words to describe the market for IBM i-based ERP software these days. But don’t tell that to the folks at VAI, who continue to develop compelling ERP software and grow its installed base, particularly on the cloud and software as a service (SaaS).

  For decades, VAI has been one of the go-to ERP providers for midsize firms in manufacturing, distribution, retail, and services. Its IBM i-based suite of software, S2K Enterprise, is trusted by hundreds of companies around North America. While many of its competitors on the platform have folded or been snapped …

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• Five Skills You Don’t Need To Manage IBM i (And Two You Do)

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  Much has been said to debunk the myth of an IBM i skills shortage or decry it as a disappearing act. Yet, year after year, respondents to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey by HelpSystems list IBM i skills as a top concern. The results also show that organizations are addressing these concerns by adding automation, modernizing development, and getting rid of obsolete technology that breeds the dreaded word: legacy.

  But why do we on IBM i continue to carry the perception that so-called “IBM i skills” are scarce? Is it because the keywords in our job listings don’t …

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• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

  You might not remember it, but BMC Software still actively supports the IBM i environment with enterprise job scheduler, called CONTROL-M. The Houston, Texas, company has supported the IBM midrange server for years, and continues to do so with the 19th version of CONTROL-M, which the …

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