• Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022

  February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad

  IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.

  IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Building Organizational Resilience in the Digital Age

  January 17, 2022 Maxime Leclair

  There is so much change happening in the world and technology is playing a critical role. Organizations must use modern digital solutions if they want to survive and thrive amid uncertainty and accelerate growth in an aggressively competitive business landscape.

  Climate change, COVID-19, global and financial crises, among other things, have exposed vulnerabilities in businesses and accelerated the need for new digital capabilities, modern systems, and processes as well as optimized and transformed legacy systems. According to research, 63 percent of organizations flag digital transformation, including building up technological infrastructure and data analytics as top strategic priorities for the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Infrastructure Challenges And Easing Into The Cloud

  November 8, 2021 Marcel Sarrasin

  There is an old saying, purportedly a Chinese curse but never proven to be anything but a saying by English diplomats who interfaced with the Middle Kingdom: “May you live in interesting times.” There is an equally mistaken etymology that the word for “crisis” in Chinese is comprised of two Mandarin words for “danger” and “opportunity.”

  Even though people misunderstand the source of these sayings, and the latter one is just simply not true at all, it is still the case that there has never been a more interesting time in the information technology sector in general and …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Talking IBM i System Management With Abacus

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want the members of your IT department to focus on the core applications that define, run, and improve your business, and they also have to manage your systems, and you have limited budgets to do it all, you have to learn to let go of something. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many people to do the work. Something has to give, and you have to keep what brings the real value.

  Having an IBM i platform provides plenty of value to start, as IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Making Quick Wins Part Of Your Modernization Strategy

  August 9, 2021 Chris Koppe

  IT leaders are being asked to do way more than keep the lights on these days. For many, the recent pandemic has exposed the need for organizations to provide effective digital experiences and enable remote work. At the same time, many industries experienced revenue loss and as a result, have fewer resources.

  Understanding where to focus efforts can be key in helping you drive the best value and stay aligned with company goals. Success often lies in striking a delicate balance between addressing modernization needs and working within reduced budgets.

  The path to modernizing IBM i applications is paved with …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Augmenting Your Programming Today, Solving Staffing Issues Tomorrow

  July 12, 2021 Leo Lymberopoulos

  Do you have a back-up for when your programmers are on vacation? If not, where would you look to fill the decades of knowledge that is needed to support your RPG or COBOL applications? Who are you going to turn to when your star IBM i programmer – your only programmer – announces plans to retire at the end of this year?

  Organizations that run IBM i applications have found themselves in some tricky situations. IBM i is a robust platform and your programmers have spent decades building and maintaining your applications to fit your business. However, as skilled RPG …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?

  We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …

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• Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Web Development Trends To Watch In the Second Half

  May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe, but in terms of budgets and thinking, within six weeks we will be entering the second half of 2021, a turning point year if there ever was one, and perhaps an inflection point for 2021 itself and thus for the next decade or so.

  The need to modernize is not lost on most IBM i shops, but it seems like there’s a new web technology to learn each week. It’s no surprise that getting started with Web development is a stumbling block in itself. That’s why vendors like Fresche are working to demystify Web development …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Innovative And Realistic Approaches To IBM i Modernization

  April 12, 2021 Chris Koppe

  In your organization, is IT considered a partner in the business or just the service department? Are your IT staff seen as innovators who are connected to your industry and the growth vision of the company? For a lot of clients that I work with on strategy, these are not ways that they would describe their IT departments. But they should be.

  At one point, IT was the enabler of innovation, helping drive automation and optimization of business processes. Now, most IT departments are maintaining more than they’re innovating, and there’s an opportunity to change that.

  Over the years I’ve …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics of the …

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