• IBM i Has a Future “If Kept Up To Date,”‘ IDC Says

  March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The slow demise and death of IBM i has been greatly exaggerated, at least in the eyes of IDC. In a white paper for Rocket Software, an analyst for the storied firm says that IBM i does indeed have a future in customers’ digital strategies, provided it’s “kept up to date.” That’s good news for the community, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

  Application modernization has been an important topic for IBM i shops for decades, particularly when it comes to organizations that believe they’re still living in the early 1990s. While you technically can run …

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• When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

  March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

  A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

  To be a managed …

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• Generative AI: Coming to an ERP Near You

  March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but generative AI technology like ChatGPT is spreading into every aspect of computing, including the large enterprise applications at the heart of business. The technology may not be on IBM i-based ERP suites yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

  The sophistication of AI technology has been building steadily for the past 10 years, thanks to the adoption of massive neural networks that can be trained on huge amounts of unstructured data, such as text and images.

  Dubbed deep learning, the brute-force approach paid handsome dividends for two computational problems in particular: computer vision and natural …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 22

  March 22, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  We’ve seen the layoffs of tech employees ramping up as of late. Amazon, Meta (nee Facebook), Twitter, Yahoo, Zoom, and the list goes on, have all announced significant personnel cuts in 2023. It’s a big turnaround from the midst of the pandemic, when tech companies were on a hiring spree to keep up with the surge to go online when everyone was stuck at home. The good news is IT pros with cybersecurity, cloud, and data analytics/machine learning skills have remained in high demand. We hope our efforts to keep you informed on these topics and learning opportunities have kept …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 12

  March 22, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  We are always on the hunt for something new, but sometimes we find something that is not new but is new to us and maybe you, too. Here is a case in point: The IBM i 7.4 section on the IBM documentation site was last updated in the last half of the year 2021 and now describes the enhancements made to ILE RPG after 7.4 with PTFs. You can see it here. Also, we wanted to point out that we have re-organized the ACS_NAV worksheet contents, adding a bunch of links to documents and several YouTube links. That is …

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• Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.

  In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of …

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• VS Code Is The Full Stack IDE For IBM i

  March 15, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  Back in January, we talked a bit about the rise of the VS Code integrated development environment that was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2015 and that has been increasingly adopted by developers on all kinds of platforms, not just Windows Server. This week, we want to talk about the new features we are exposing in VS Code for users of the application development tooling available from ARCAD Software.

  First of all, we have brought the cross reference information in our ARCAD Observer tool into VS Code in a way that developers can access the object-level and field-level …

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• Domino Runs on IBM i 7.5, But HCL Still Working on Power10

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use Domino to serve email and drive other forms of communication will be happy to know they can run Domino 12.2 on IBM i 7.5. However, if they want to run the setup on a Power10 server, they will need to wait a little longer for HCL to support it.

  Back in 2017, HCL Technologies took over development and maintenance of the Domino and Notes product line from IBM. Two years later, the India-based tech firm pushed out version 10 of Domino and Notes and related products (like Sametime, Traveler, and Verse), the first major …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 6

  March 15, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  March Madness is taking on a different meaning this year. Yes, it’s still the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament that fans look forward to every year, but March 2023 has also been a little crazy. Parts of Northern and Southern California have been covered in snow, burying roads and houses, disrupting power, and snapping branches off trees in areas that aren’t prepared for more than an occasional light dusting snow. The Federal government is attempting to stave off panic in the banking industry following the collapse of two banks. And let’s just not even think about world politics right …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 11

  March 15, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Even when there is not a lot going in with PTF Groups or security vulnerabilities or other things with the IBM i platform, there is always something going on with the IBM i PTF Guide. This week is a slow one, and so that gave us time to catch up on the links embedded within the Guide. Keep an eye out for them next week and also for a video log for Access Client Services.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF …

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