• Coding Is Never Without A Reason; PHP Has 10

  February 1, 2016 Dan Burger

  PHP is the open source success story for IBM i. Its support by IBM and particularly Zend Technologies has given it quite a boost. And it’s proved to be capable of leveraging the IBM i operating system, DB2 for i, and RPG code. Beyond that, it is compatible with almost every operating system and hardware platform you can name, which provides the cross-platform capabilities that demolishes siloed information. Several IBM i independent software vendors offer PHP development tools. Two of them, BCD Software and Zend Technologies, released an e-book last week titled Top Ten Reasons to Choose PHP for IBM

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• Power Systems Turns In A Full Year Of Growth

  January 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There have been worse years in the Power Systems business than 2015, and in fact, 2014 was one of them. In its latest financial reports, IBM said that that it has turned in four quarters of revenue growth for the Power server unit, no doubt helped by an uptake of Power8 systems as customers do their inevitable upgrades. As the year wound down, IBM was running on its entry and high-end cylinders, the first time in a while when that happened. IBM Systems, the hardware unit of the company that sells servers and storage and is responsible for operating system

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• What To Do With All Those Spare CPWs

  January 25, 2016 Alex Woodie

  If there’s one thing that the average IBM i shop with a typical business forecast doesn’t need, it’s more CPW. The latest generation of Power8 servers offer more than enough computational oomph to get the job done, which raises the question: What should one do with those spare CPWs? With some forward thinking, the average IBM i shop maybe doesn’t have to be so average anymore. There is no doubt there’s a power glut of Power8 iron in IBM‘s IBM i market. Each Power8 chip has roughly 50 percent more computational power per core than the Power7 chip launched

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• Web Portal Not An IBM i Modernization Bit Player

  January 25, 2016 Dan Burger

  The portal piece of modernization projects seldom gets top billing. All eyes are on the graphical user interface and efforts to scour the green screen out of sight from those who believe it is the work of the devil. But dagnabbit, it’s the portal that unifies information and applications from a galaxy of diverse sources and displays it in an orderly fashion. It’s the key to proprietary information that’s shared among authorized users. “We see a lot of B2B companies building portals,” says Marcel Sarrasin, vice president of marketing at Quadrant Software, the parent company of BCD Software, one of

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Pythia And The Two-Legged Pig

  January 25, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  The great temple of Apollo stands at Delphi on Mt. Parnassus. Centuries ago, an elder priestess at this temple, yclept Pythia, was an oracle, offering prophecies to those able to correctly interpret her words. Today, Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway is IBM’s largest shareholder, is called the Oracle of Omaha. Buffett looks the part, resembling a benign grandma. He has more money than all of Greece, although right now plenty of people enjoy that distinction. Like Pythia the Oracle, Buffett can be baffling; less gifted people cannot understand why Buffett is up to his ears in IBM

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• Baseline Data Boss Predicts Steady Stream Of Outsourced Production Environments

  January 25, 2016 Dan Burger

  If there is a demand for managed services in the IBM midrange market, you can begin measuring it 20 years ago. It’s not a new thing, but some of the services are new. For many companies, those contracting for managed services as well as those that provide the services, the managed services relationship has been long established. Usually it’s based on a disaster recovery service. But what about the new demand? We’ve written about this before in IT Jungle articles. When will the managed services business become more than the disaster recovery business? It already has. Nearly every managed service

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• Carbonite Nabs EVault to Build One-Stop DR Shop for SMB Masses

  January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Carbonite is buying the EVault data protection business from Seagate for $14 million in cash, the companies announced last month. While the deal marks a nearly 10x decline in valuation for EVault, the folks at Carbonite are clearly happy to get their hands on EVault’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) business, which it sees pairing up nicely with its existing products for small businesses and consumers. EVault began developing its online data protection business way back at the dawn of the commercial Internet in 1997. By backing up its clients’ data over the Web to centrally located servers, the

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• Micro Focus Debuting Native 5250 Emulator for iOS

  January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IT pros who want to access an IBM i server directly from their iPad or iPhone will soon have another way to do that thanks to Micro Focus, which is rolling out a new 5250 emulator that runs natively on iOS devices. The new product, which IT Jungle has learned will be called Reflection for TN3270 and TN5250, will be available soon from the Apple App Store for less than $50 per device. Micro Focus is arguably the largest provider of terminal emulation software outside of IBM itself. The company acquired NetManage and its popular RUMBA (nee, Rumba) product

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• Round Three of IBM i Predictions for 2016

  January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The one constant in this universe is change, and the IBM i business is no different. The server platform is now in its fourth decade of service, counting go back to the System/3 days, and the pace of technological change in the business IT sector demands agility at many levels. In our third and final installment of our annual IBM i predictions, we have predictions from five IBM i pros about the changes we can expect this year. Bob Langieri director of IT recruiting at Excel Technical Services “I continue to see a slow but demeaning departure of some longtime

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• Object Replication at the Touch of a Button

  January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who struggle to distribute objects across multiple IBM i systems for patching, testing, or other purposes may be interested in a new product from Shield Advanced Solutions. The software, dubbed RE4i, can automatically distribute practically any type of IBM i object to one or more remote systems with the press of a button, thereby saving time and reducing hassle for programmers and administrators alike. Most midrange administrators use a combination of FTP and save/restore commands to distribute and apply objects–such as PTFs or application changes–to remote IBM i servers. The admins probably don’t view the manual

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