• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• IBM i Shops Have Alternatives to Db2 Web Query

  November 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The sudden demise of Db2 Web Query has sent customers looking for alternatives. The good news is that IBM i software vendors offer a number of pre-built solutions that can fit the bill.

  Here are some potential business intelligence tools from vendors that could serve as replacements to Db2 Web Query. We’ll take a look at open source alternatives in a future article.

  Cozzi Research SQL World

  Cozzi Research develops two query tools for IBM i, including SQL iQuery and SQL Tools, and bundles them both in a single product called SQL World.

  Cozzi positions SQL iQuery as a native …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

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• Beware The Hype Of Modern Tech

  April 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops are under the gun to modernize their applications as part of a digital transformation initiative. If the app is more than 10 or 15 years old and doesn’t use the latest technology and techniques, it’s considered a legacy system that must be torn down and rebuilt according to current code. But there are substantial risks associated with these efforts – not the least of which that the modern method is essentially incompatible with the IBM i architecture as it currently exists. IBM i shops should be careful when evaluating these new directions.

  Amy Anderson, a modernization …

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• Infor CM3 to Provide On-Prem Alternative to Cloudy M3

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  For years, Infor has been leading with the cloud when it comes to M3, the ERP system formerly known as Movex. But now, the software giant is readying a new hybrid deployment option called CM3 that will run in a Linux or Windows container and IBM i.

  Long before Infor completed its Lawson acquisition in April 2012 — even before Lawson finished its acquisition of Intentia in 2006 — plans were solidly in place to migrate the core RPG code underpinning the Movex suite to Java, thereby opening the software to run on platforms besides just IBM i, its historical …

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• In Search of Multi-Modal Data Integration

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the number of data sources that companies use goes up, so too does the complexity of the data pipelines that bring it all together. Instead of using a mix of different tools and technologies for ETL, ELT, and batch integration, some users are seeking a single multi-modal data integration tool that can deliver multiple integration approaches.

  One company providing multi-modal data integration is Equalum. The company’s DataOps offering works in various methodologies, including capturing real-time database updates using change data capture (CDC) technology; batch-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) and ELT; and REST- and SOAP-based data integration using …

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• More Open Source Databases Coming To IBM i

  June 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM is in the process of bringing several new open source databases to the IBM i platform, including schema-less NoSQL databases as well traditional relational systems. Among the databases that Rochester is targeting are MongoDB, arguably the most popular NoSQL database and a favorite among Web and mobile developers, as well as PostgreSQL, one of the industry’s oldest and most widely used relational databases.

  Databases today almost are like programming languages, with developers mixing and matching databases to handle different functions, often within the same application. DB-Engines.com tracks more than 330 distinct databases, while there are somewhere around 700 programming …

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• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

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• Data Protection in the New Regulated Era

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies must protect their data from all sorts of threats these days, including power outages, failed servers, and drive crashes. But one of the most important aspects of data protection today is ensuring the security and privacy of data, which is mandated by a slew of emerging data regulations.

  In May 2018, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a far-reaching new law that gave people sweeping new rights over their data. While GDPR ostensibly just impacts EU citizens, many large companies in the U.S. and other countries adopted new security and privacy processes to ensure consistence …

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