• IBM Layoffs Not As Dramatic As Rumored

  February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do. Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of

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• IBM’s Licensing Practices Under Scrutiny

  February 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Buying enterprise software is never easy. But the complexity and heavy-handedness that IBM and the other megavendors bring to software licensing and enforcement hurts everybody involved. That’s the opinion of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, which recently announced that it is going to step up its analysis of Big Blue’s licensing practices. The Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) last month announced that it is stepping up its research of IBM and SAP software licensing strategies in hopes of helping customers navigate overly complex structures and pressuring the vendors into simplifying their policies. To that end, the UK-based firm held

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• Security Risks Avoided By The Development Team

  February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Some ideas need to be told and retold before the concept is fully grasped and action results. This isn’t the first time outspoken IBM i security expert Pat Botz has warned developers about dangerous security assumptions. This advice comes periodically, and it demonstrates how people hear without listening. That’s maybe a bit too harsh because there are indications it’s become more widely recognized that programmers have a role in data security at the application level. “You can’t secure a system these days without the programmers knowing about security,” Botz says. “Programmers can’t write programs that make data available to anyone

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• German Hotel Search Engine Mashes Up Watson And IBM i

  February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems. An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the

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• Surrounding The IBM i

  February 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM has a plan for the IBM i operating system. It sounds slightly ominous and it might even cause some of the IBM i advocates to lock the doors to the server room. It’s not a secret. In fact, some say the idea is gaining support. The idea is to surround the i. Surround it with new Linux workloads, primarily analytics workloads, which to a large degree involve mobile and, to a lesser degree, social applications. Maybe you don’t give a flying flapjack about Linux. Maybe, from your point of view, it’s still not ready for enterprise operating system duty

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• Infor Cloud EDI . . . DocOrigin Replaces JetForm . . . Empowered with Web Services . . .

  February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Infor takes a very industry-focused approach to software, and that is no different with its latest EDI cloud offering. If you’re looking for document management software to replace Adobe JetForm, DocOrigin would like to speak with you. Web services are popping up everywhere these days, including in the application development power tool from mrc. Infor Launches EDI Cloud for Auto Manufacturing Infor last month unveiled EDI Managed Service, a cloud-based EDI offering designed specifically for companies in the automotive supply chain. According to Infor’s announcement, the new service combines an EDI translator from its partner Rocket Software along with its

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• REST Services For IBM i In developerWorks Spotlight

  February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the exciting new features added to IBM i in late 2014 is support for REST-based Web services. The rest of the world has accepted REST services as the de-facto integration standard on the Web, and now this approach is being supported within IBM i too. But how do you actually go about building and managing REST services in IBM i? Let the smart IBMers at developerWorks show you how. REST services are very new to IBM i, having been announced by IBM just four months ago and delivered in late December 2014 with the various HTTP Group

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• How Trek Solved Its IBM i-to-Cloud Data Integration Challenge

  February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When the bicycle manufacturer Trek started looking for a CRM system several years ago, the cloud beckoned loudly. While the company has happy with its on-premise ERP system running on IBM i hardware, the new CRM would live in the cloud. But getting data back and forth between the two systems wouldn’t be easy. Luckily, the company found a tool that made data integrating cloud and on-prem data simple. From its headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, Trek Bicycle Corp. makes and sells hundreds of thousands of bicycles every year to customers around the world. The privately held company, which in 2006

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• Chrono-Logic Change Management Software Targets IBM i

  February 4, 2015 Dan Burger

  Business-focused application development is what IBM midrange programmers do. That part hasn’t changed. How they do it has changed quite a bit, particularly since organizations have gained a greater awareness of the business benefits of modernization. This goes beyond the beautification of green-screen apps and digs much deeper into the functionality of the business logic and includes database modernization, too. And it shines a light on change management software and what it adds to the modernization effort. We are seeing change management software vendors become more active in telling the modernization story. They are making investments in their products and

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• BCD Bolsters RPG OA Support in Presto 6

  February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  BCD Software has been supporting the RPG Open Access technology in its Presto modernization tool for less than a year, and it’s safe to say that most Presto customers are still using the traditional 5250 access method. But the software vendor is moving strongly to cement its capabilities in the RPG Open Access arena with some slick new features in Presto 6, which was just released. Presto, if you’re unfamiliar, is a tactical modernization tool that automatically transforms green screens into Web interfaces that can be accessed from any Web browser. BCD ships a number of pre-defined “skins” that give

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