• Four Hundred Monitor, April 13

  April 13, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  An activity in which many people are asked a question or a series of questions in order to gather information about what most people do or think about something? Answer: What is a survey? We’re always pointing out surveys to you, our readers, here in the Jungle, because it is a valuable way we have of finding out what’s going on out there in IBM i Land. So forgive us for nagging but if you can spare a few moments, we have another one to point out to you at the top of our Redbooks, White Papers, Blogs, and Other …

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• Reader Feedback On The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 13, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, TPM:

  I just read your State of the IBM i Base: Third Party Software Conundrum. What you describe is eerily similar to our situation, but with a twist. I’ve been here 25 years as of last week. We installed a third-party ERP shortly after my arrival. Over the years I have made slight modifications, maintained our annual maintenance, and basically built our business around it.

  However, in our case the ISV has (for the last 10 years) not held up their end of agreement. Our last version upgrade was 2009, and basically no “modernization” has been done to …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

  April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin

  The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.

  This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …

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• Guru: Debugging SQL Stored Procedures With ACS

  April 11, 2022 Mike Larsen

  I use Access Client Solutions (ACS) daily to help with different tasks. I’m usually running SQL scripts or working with the IFS, but recently I was asked if there was a way to debug SQL stored procedures using ACS. More specifically, they were looking for a way that a “non-IBM i” person can debug SQL stored procedures on IBM i.

  After browsing the various menus in Run SQL Scripts in ACS, I found a system debugger. I had seen the system debugger before, but never took the time to explore it further. With this new request in mind, I decided …

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• Cloud-Based Stock Optimization Solution Integrates With IBM i

  April 11, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Since COVID-19 struck two years ago, we have seemingly jumped from one supply chain problem to another. First, it was toilet paper and cleaning supplies that were flying off the shelves, then it was shortages of anything with a microchip. The shortage du jour: baby formula. Now a Georgia company called Thrive Technologies is using machine learning technology to help distributors stay on top of supply chain disruptions.

  Thrive Technologies has been developing inventory planning solutions since it was founded in 2001 by CEO Rick Morris. The company says it picks up the inventory slack where ERP solutions typically …

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• Reader Feedback On State Of The IBM i Base, IBM i Salaries

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, TPM:

  I have been enjoying your series on the state of the IBM i environment. Those and other recent IT Jungle articles have helped me better understand some of the things that I am seeing as a training vendor.

  As you and I have often discussed, the IBM i market has divided into two groups: the roughly 30,000 active customers and 120,000 others. My company, Manta Technologies, has customers among both groups.

  As a former math professor, I tend to think in Venn diagrams. I had to fight the urge to pull out the colored pencils when I read …

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• Glimpsing Hope in the IBM i Security Situation

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  These are dark days in the security business, thanks to the boom in ransomware, the looming threat of cyberwar with Russia, and the poor security of IBM i servers. But just as it’s darkest before the dawn, there could be some preliminary indications that the IBM i community is finally starting to wake up when it comes to securing their most important applications, systems, and data.

  It’s hard to be optimistic in the face of repeated failures. When it comes to IBM i security, those failures have been well-documented in annual State of Security reports for nearly two decades by …

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• Skytap Bullish as Momentum Grows for Cloudy Power LPARs

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Since announcing support for IBM i in late 2018, Skytap has seen interest build for its public cloud offering, which leverages Power servers installed Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud data centers. Now, thanks to an expanded partnership with Microsoft and a new certification with SAP, the company expects migrations of IBM i and AIX customers into the cloud to continue picking up steam.

  Skytap has a unique offering in the cloud hosting business, particularly as it pertains to Power customers, who have a much smaller set of runtime options in an X86-dominated world.

  The Seattle, Washington, company has a deal …

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• Instana Brings Observability to IBM i Applications

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It can be hard to figure out what’s causing application performance problems in the modern cloud- and microservices-based era. One possible solution that IBM i shops may look to is IBM Observability by Instana APM, an application performance management solution that now supports IBM i.

  Instana was founded in 2015 with the goal of providing observability into a new generation of applications that are cloud-native, which typically means that they run in a containerized fashion (often atop Kubernetes), and communicate using microservices. IBM announced its intent to acquire the Chicago-based company in November 2020, and completed the deal about a …

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