• Facing The Challenges Of Upgrading Old Systems With The Cloud

  September 18, 2023 Jason Hardy

  If you are one of the many IBM i shops that has always created its own applications and that has a long history of investing in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms over the past three and a half decades at reasonably regular intervals to keep the hardware and the systems software current, you have it relatively easy and we definitely want to talk to you about your move to the cloud and how we might help.

  But if you are one of the many OS/400 and IBM i shops that have, for myriad reasons, gotten stuck …

  Read more

• Inside IBM’s Efforts To Modernize The ISV Army

  May 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” IBM executives must feel a bit like the eminently quotable Don Rumsfeld, former Secretary of the Department of Defense, as they marshal their assets in the battle for application supremacy. While some of Big Blue’s partners have honed their IBM i applications into modern weapons, others are fielding old equipment more suitable for a previous war.

  It’s no state secret that Big Blue has a legacy problem on its hands in the IBM i world. When the …

  Read more

• Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance

  April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.

  PerfScan is the first product – and …

  Read more

• The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty

  February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.

  What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …

  Read more

• Db2 Web Query: Way More Than Just A Query Tool

  February 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You might be forgiven for thinking that Db2 Web Query is just a way to run your SQL queries on IBM i from a browser. After all, “Web” and “query” are right there in the name, aren’t they? But the product’s name belies the true nature of this multi-threat analytics application, which can do a whole lot more for IBM i shops than just run queries.

  IBM’s Doug Mack tackled this reality-assumption gap during a recent webinar on Db2 Web Query, which received a bunch of new capabilities with the recent version 2.4.0 upgrade. Mack, a longtime IBMer whose …

  Read more

• How HelpSystems Became Fortra

  November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems, a longtime provider of utilities for IBM i servers and their predecessors, has been on the security warpath of late, using private equity funding to acquire dozens of security software and services firms. The Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company officially completed its pivot to security last week by changing its name to Fortra.

  HelpSystems started life back in 1982 when it was founded by Dick Jacobson, who created the first Robot/38 product. Over the years, the company (then called “Help/Systems”) would expand its well-respected suite of general-purpose Robot utilities, such as job scheduling, backup and recovery, and system monitoring, for …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: The Real Top 5 Challenges For IBM i Shops Today

  May 9, 2022 Christine McDowell

  The only way to really find out what is on people’s minds is to ask them, and maybe you need to ask them two or three times and take an average. As a supplier of development, modernization, and security tools and services, we ask a lot of questions and we do a lot of assessments for IBM i customers, and we look at any and all surveys that anyone does and synthesize this to help drive our business.

  We have been through a series of surveys of our own as well as ones that we have helped promote or sponsored …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

  Read more

• It Is Time To Take The 2022 State Of IBM i Survey

  March 21, 2022 Miranda VanHorn

  The market for IBM i platform – previously known as the AS/400, the iSeries, and the System i – has seen some remarkable changes over the last decade. New capabilities, including graphical user interfaces and support of open-source languages, have ensured that the platform is more than capable of supporting the needs of today’s businesses.

  The annual Profound Logic State of IBM i Modernization Survey looks at trends and attitudes that shape the IBM i modernization market. The data collected gives the entire community a better understanding of the current state of IBM i and the priorities of businesses with …

  Read more

• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

  Read more

Previous Articles