• Software Price Inflation Helps Boost IT Spending In 2023

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Datacenter and client device sales are slumping and are expected to be down from spending levels in 2022, according to the latest prognostications for worldwide IT spending from market researcher Gartner. But thanks to exploding budgets for software and services, the market for IT spending across all categories is anticipated to grow at a fairly healthy rate this year – and will do better in 2024, if Gartner is right.

  That is a big “if” of course. The only way to accurately predict the future is to live it – and even that is looking dubious sometimes. (Wink.) …

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• Generative AI Is Part Of Application Modernization Now

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Generative AI is funny in that it is both an application in its own right when equipped with a chatbot interface and some intelligent prompting with guardrails to keep it from hallucinating and it can also be used as a tool to either generate chunks of applications based on large language models tweaked with a library of code.

  This is the first time that we can think of where the application is the tool or the tool is the application, and it presents a kind of chicken and egg conundrum for IT departments all over the world. Mainly: Where do …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 34

  August 21, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  It is still summer, and the big news again this week in PTF Land is a security vulnerability. This time the hole is in the WebSphere Liberty middleware from Big Blue. See Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service (CVE-2023-38737), which you can find out more about at this link. IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty versions 22.0.0.13 through 23.0.0.7 are affected.

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • Java
  • IBM HTTP Server for i
  • SAP support

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• With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions

  August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.

  Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …

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• Fighting Fake News in Digital Transformation

  August 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s not news that businesses across the globe are embarking upon ambitious digital transformation projects, which are often advertised as an imperative to commercial survival. While these projects can be successful and profitable, they can also lead to business disruptions and losses thanks to unscrupulous vendors that aren’t attuned to customer needs. That’s why it’s so important to highlight the fake news and misinformation that’s so rampant in digital transformation.

  ERP projects are notorious for going off the rails, and modern-day digital transformation projects are no different. In fact, more than half of digital transformation projects experience a “material disruption” …

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• MOVEit Vulnerability Yields Another 4 Million Breached Records

  August 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A zero-day security vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software discovered in late spring has been wreaking havoc across American companies this summer. The latest victims are people signed up for Colorado’s version of Medicaid, who had their data compromised when cybercriminals used the flaw to access their data in the IBM Cloud.

  The Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing (HCPF) recently notified customers that a security incident took place that resulted in unauthorized actors having access to the protected health information of members involved in two of its programs, including Health First Colorado, which is the state’s …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 16

  August 16, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Tennis fans look forward to the U.S. Open. Technology fans do, too, but for different reasons. “Fans accessing the U.S. Open digital experiences this year will be able to experience every singles match, across all 17 courts, with detailed audio narration and captions accompanying each video – thanks to the power of IBM’s watsonx generative AI, specifically trained on the language of tennis,” said Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president of communications and marketing at IBM. Not sure how John McEnroe and his fellow commentators feel about being replaced by watsonx, but read our Top Story to see what all fans …

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• Raz-Lee Updates Anti-Ransomware

  August 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Ransomware is not the summer blockbuster that it was in 2021, when hundreds of unprepared organizations across the country succumbed to attacks. But neither has ransomware disappeared as a security problem. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to stake out a ransomware strategy, which could involve deploying Raz-Lee Security’s unique IBM i software.

  Raz-Lee Security rolled out its Anti-Ransomware product back in the summer of 2018, well before the huge uptick in attacks that occurred in 2021. The software works by first detecting ransomware attacks, which would typically target files in the IFS. It then would take action, …

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• Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.

  As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …

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• A Simple Plan To Boost IBM i Visibility

  August 14, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you are a consumer of mainstream news, it can be hard to find anything about IBM i. The proprietary business platform isn’t marketed by IBM in advertisements and it receives very little coverage in mainstream IT publications. But a salesman for an IBM i business partner has come up with an easy yet compelling way to boost the visibility of the platform.

  Earlier this month, Josh Bander, who is an enterprise account executive at Briteskies, shared a recent conversation he had through his LinkedIn page .“Over the weekend, I spoke to a few of my friends in IT, …

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