Dan Burger
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Modernization or Migration? Survey Aims to Sort Out the Direction
December 9, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen the IBM i Redbook on modernization was released in March 2014, it became the “all you ever wanted to know” guidebook for modernizing everything about an aging, neglected system–a road map for migrating IT environments designed for the world as we knew it 20 years ago to IT environments for 2015, 2020, and beyond. Where are we now? That’s what IBM i ISV Profound Logic hopes to answer with a new modernization survey for IBM midrange shops.
There’s no one size fits all or a single way to do modernization that each organization can follow. There are many choices
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Fresche Legacy Gets $6 Million Infusion To Expand
December 7, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt might surprise some people to read about companies that are investing in the IBM midrange platform. After all, at least one of the top research and analysis firms has had IBM i, and before that the iSeries, and before that the AS/400, on a death watch for something like a dozen years or so. Not everyone believes that. And here’s a $6 million reason why the IBM i market is worthy of investment.
When IBM i ISV Fresche Legacy looked for an investor that could give the application modernization software company a lift, it found rather quickly what it
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IBM i Horror Story With A Happy Ending
December 7, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreUsers of IBM i and its predecessors have had their share of horror stories. Those on any other business computing platform can say the same. However, I think it’s fair to say the IBM midrange platform is no worse than any other and is better than its competition in many ways. But that doesn’t make it a fairy tale. Evidence of this is the IBM Entitled Systems Support. Also known as the portal to hell.
For just about anyone who has tried to order a product or a product upgrade from IBM, this is a horror story. The needle on
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Remain Taps JIRA to Heighten Change Management Collaboration
December 2, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreControlling the chaos of collaboration from an application development perspective has proved to be a valuable asset for many IBM midrange customers. Better code, with the bugs worked out before it goes into production, saves time and money compared to debugging and redesigning after the fact. The value goes beyond writing code because collaboration applies to many business oriented teams and numerous end users who are effected sometimes for the better and other times for the worse.
Project tracking comes in many flavors, so Remain Software is integrating its application lifecycle management tool, TD/OMS, with multiple popular options. Its latest
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LANSA Shows Off Responsive Design Capabilities
November 18, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreDesigning Web pages that display on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone are no longer considered in terms of individual development efforts. That eats up too much time and often becomes an application maintenance nightmare. One development effort that results in user interfaces that correctly display regardless of the device is the new normal. Making the build process quick and the performance fast is the goal everyone is aiming for. LANSA is the latest option for making this happen.
The process of building applications with interfaces that change depending on where they’re presented–desktop, laptop, tablet, or
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IBM i Mobile Apps Made Easy
November 18, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAs the number of IBM midrange shops building mobile applications grows, the ideas about features and functionality expands. Rising to the top of that list for many companies is the usefulness of a bar code scanner in combination with IBM i-based applications. It’s a demand that BCD Software has noticed and it led to creation of Presto Mobile, an app for accessing modernized green screens from iPhones and iPads.
Accessibility to IBM i data is a basic requirement, but the added capability of using the built-in camera as a bar code scanner is the driving force behind Presto Mobile, according
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Technology Refreshes Go Unnoticed By Most IBM i Shops
November 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM midrange community is full of normal people trying to keep the lid on a can of worms and make a living. In the pursuit of what should be two simple and compatible objectives, there’s a lot of fancy dancing going on. What has to get done today overrides the broader view of what could be done. The IBM i development team rolls out Technology Refreshes, but relatively few take notice.
On Friday, November 20, Technology Refresh (TR) 11 for IBM i 7.1 and TR 3 for IBM i 7.2 will become generally available, or GA in the lingo
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HelpSystems’ Application Integration Begins With GUI
November 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAlmost every IBM midrange shop faces integration issues. The next piece of the IT puzzle has to fit in with existing environment, or the system that was functional 15 years ago requires modernization to make it functional today and into the foreseeable future. You’re lucky if you are only dealing with one piece of the puzzle at a time. In fact, that rarely happens. You have to sort through a pile of priorities and make a plan. You need a road map.
Integration lessons come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes we learn quickly and
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IBM i Development Team Considering Native .NET
November 9, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreZero tolerance for AIX. It’s an exaggeration, but not that much of an exaggeration within the IBM midrange community. There is a small amount of tolerance. And where there is tolerance, the seeds of open source have an opportunity to sprout and grow. PHP has shown that open source can be accepted as a viable application development environment. Ruby, Python, and Node.js are relatively new to the platform and are trying to gain a foothold. Now get ready for open source .NET.
Don’t expect IBM to drop .NET on your doorstep next week, next month, or next year. But it’s
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Tango/04 Boosts IT-Business Alignment Capabilities
November 4, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreMuch of the alignment of IT and business processes can be better served with automated monitoring and management. In the IBM midrange community, systems management is a highly desirable and sometimes implemented capability. But automation has moved beyond the parameters that were set when the AS/400 and iSeries environments were the workhorses in the stable. There are new frontiers being explored by companies such as Tango/04 and its Alignia lineup of infrastructure, middleware, and application monitoring software.
Tango takes the approach of managing infrastructure according to business needs. The company calls it business service management. It can be explained by