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Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions For 2018
January 17, 2018 Alex Woodie
It may just be another day on the calendar, but there’s something special about January 1. The beginning of a new year gives us a chance to ponder industry trends and anticipate what’s likely to occur over the next 364 days. We’re two weeks into the new year, but it’s not too late to turn the mic over to IBM i industry insiders for their 2018 predictions.
Here’s what they had to say:
“Extending and stretching applications is the order of the day. Refactoring and modernizing. More and more shops running legacy apps will come out of the shadows as …
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IBM Patches 28 More Security Vulns In JDK
October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie
IBM on Saturday released patches to fix 28 flaws in the Java Development Kit (JDK) that ships with the IBM i operating system. Almost all of the flaws originated in Oracle’s underlying Java Standard Edition (SE) kit, and many of them are considered very severe.
Twenty-seven of the 28 flaws impact the IBM SDK Java Technology Edition software in all releases of IBM i, from version 6.1 to version 7.3, according to the September 28 security bulletin. The patches released by IBM fix the problems in all of these releases. While i5/OS V5R4 is likely impacted too, IBM will …
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What Is Driving Application Modernization?
August 7, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What you don’t measure you cannot manage, the old adage says. And the key vendors in the IBM i community, ever chasing that next opportunity, do a pretty good job querying the installed base of customers about what they are up to and why. A better job than Big Blue, which should be the biggest beneficiary of the 125,000-strong IBM i base, if you want to be truthful about it.
We are always on the hunt for any insight into what is going on out there in IBM i Land, and Rocket Software, a provider of application modernization and …
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Have You Patched Those 35 Java Vulns on IBM i?
July 19, 2017 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that take security seriously will want to know that IBM has issued a number of security patches over the past several months. The patch count since March includes fixes for security vulnerabilities in various technologies supported in IBM i 6.1 through 7.3, including 35 alone in Java, as well as flaws in Python, Samba, BIND, and the integrated Web server.
Implementing security patches, or program temporary fixes (PTFs) in IBM jargon, is one of the easiest ways to ensure your system is kept up-to-date against vulnerabilities that are constantly being exposed by the hacker community. It’s also …
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Of Course i’s Not The AS/400
July 17, 2017 Alex Woodie
The AS/400 was a great computer. No doubt about that. In the pantheon of business machines, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that remotely compares to IBM’s long-lived midrange champion. But today’s IBM i on Power Systems platform has evolved far beyond the AS/400, and midrange professionals who cling to the old words and ways are doing us all a disservice. Are you one of them?
Chances are, you’re not. If you’re reading this article, you’re likely one of the “engaged” midrange professionals who takes an active interest in news, works to improve your skills, and embraces newer technologies available …
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Programmer Productivity Underscores Remain’s App Management Upgrades
July 12, 2017 Dan Burger
If the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were bumped up to Eight, the original OS/400 applications could fill that slot. They were an efficient combination of form and function and built to last. But change eventually occurs. These days, it occurs more rapidly than ever. Application development strategies come in multiple shapes and sizes. We are witness to the debates and deployments of modernizations and migrations.
Change management software has taken on a bigger role by becoming useful in multi-platform development environments (one tool for tracking all development), workflow management, and for the expanded role of application lifecycle management. …
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Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine
June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …
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Seven Bright Spots To Ponder On The AS/400’s 29th Birthday
June 21, 2017 Alex Woodie
Today is the 29th birthday of the AS/400. If the box was a person, it would be pondering the big three-oh coming next year, and perhaps taking one last year to bask in the glory of youth. While the IBM i platform is no youngster, it’s far from the grave.
Here are seven bright spots that could potentially illuminate the platform’s path forward into middle age:
All About Those Apps, Apps, Apps
IT decision makers typical don’t start using a particular computer platform because of the platform itself, but because of the applications. Applications drive server sales.
The IBM i …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 20
May 24, 2017 Doug Bidwell
The most amazing fix that Big Blue has ever done for the techies who administer and program the IBM i platform happened last week: After 16 years of playing the same snippet of song in a loop for those dying on hold waiting for the support line, IBM finally relented and changed its tune.
I had to hang up and call back to have them put me on hold so I could verify that it was not an accident. Amazing!
In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there is a bunch of stuff going on. The MQ for IBM …
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Contain Your IBM i Enthusiasm
May 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the IT business, what is old is often new again. And so it is with the software containers that are taking certain datacenters by storm these days, and the virtual machines and hypervisors that run them that predate them as a volume product on X86 servers by a decade.
Let’s have some fun with history.
Virtual machines were invented for IBM mainframes in the VM operating system way back in the dawn of time, well, 1972 with the launch of Virtual Machine Facility/370, which ran a lightweight operating system called the Conversational Monitoring system and as it matured could …
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