IBM i shops that have European customers, take note: In about 18 months, you will need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or face hefty fines. That’s not much time to come to grips with a data privacy law that’s been called “PCI on steroids” and an “IRS audit of your data,” but that’s the reality nonetheless.

If you’re wondering what the heck this GDPR thing is, you’re not alone. A survey conducted by Dell last month indicates that fewer than 20 percent of company representatives were even aware of GDPR. But as the old saying goes,

Some people say data is the new oil. If that’s true, then what better business to be in than selling tools to the data miners? That’s basically what HiT Software does. IT Jungle recently caught up with Giacomo Lorenzin, the managing director for the BackOffice Associates subsidiary, to talk about what’s driving business, the latest in data integration tools, and the state of the industry.

This is a condensed version of a Q and A that was conducted via email.

IT Jungle: First of all, how’s business? How are sales of IBM i software going?

Giacomo Lorenzin: The

When Kisco Information Systems launched its $400 alerting tool in 2015, there were questions whether a relatively simple product would resonate with IBM i shops. A year later, Kisco is delivering a second version of iEventMonitor, and customers are singing its praise.

Kisco launched iEventMonitor in March 2015 with a basic premise: provide monitoring and alerting of key IBM i resources like QSYSOPR and QSYSMSG queues, the job queue, message queues and storage and CPU monitoring.

While other vendors developed tools that could automatically respond to events on an IBM i server, Kisco eschewed the extra functionality that would increase

The notion that what goes on in the IT departments of companies in the gaming industry translates into IT departments of every other business is not a long-shot bet. The gaming business–casinos and their tentacles that reach into restaurants and lodging–is as customer-focused as any business you can name. And, as many of you know, it’s a bastion of IBM midrange computing–an important niche in the IBM i ecosystem.

Developments here often fan out to other industries when business efficiencies and increased revenue generation opportunities have been demonstrated.

Agilysys, with its property management, inventory and procurement software Stratton Warren

Zend today will officially launch the beta program for Zend Server for IBM i version 9 and the new PHP 7 language running on the Power Systems platform. The combination of the new language and runtime, which are being unveiled at the annual ZendCon 2016 show in Las Vegas this week, is expected to give customers a big boost in performance for their PHP applications, provided they don’t run into backward compatibility breaks that Zend built into the framework.

Performance is the definite headliner for the new PHP 7 language and Zend Server runtime. As we told you back in