• A Few Power Systems Items At The Cusp Of The New Year

  January 10, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome back, everyone. We hope you had a joyous vacation, and that you took your vitamins and got your rest to take on a new year.

  It is generally pretty quiet in the IT racket in late December of one year and early January in the next year, and the bridge between 2023 and 2024 is no different. But there were a few items that came to our attention that we want to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter AD23-1087, dated December 12, 2023, Big Blue has put some 5250 Enablement features that were withdrawn from marketing in …

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• Rocket Launches CM-Kit for Continuous Modernization

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve read about continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI-CD. Now Rocket Software wants you think about a related topic called continuous modernization, which refers to an uninterrupted re-invention of your applications via Web enablement and APIs. It recently launched a new suite of software, called the Continuous Modernization Kit, to help customers deliver that on their IBM i servers.

  Web-enablement of greenscreen 5250 applications has been a thing since at least the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom drove the initial commercialization of the Internet. That was followed closely by mobile enablement, which Apple turbocharged with its 2007 launch …

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• White Hats Completely Dismantle Menu-Based Security

  February 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Think menu-based security can prevent cybercriminals from accessing the most important parts of your IBM i system? Think again, as the white hat hacking group Silent Signal recently demonstrated in a real-world penetration test of a bank’s IBM i system through a seemingly restricted green-screen interface.

  Life was demonstrably simpler for midrange administrators before the Internet took off. Before we had all these different protocols providing access to applications and data – ODBC, FTP, SQL, Remote Command, etc. – an administrator could feel somewhat confident that users weren’t accessing things they shouldn’t by simply configuring their menus in a restrictive …

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• Smart Modernization Is The Answer To IBM i Talent Shortage

  September 28, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  When we are at the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference a few months ago, we were amazed by the number of IT managers that approached us because of a shortage of IBM i programming talent. The dearth of programmers that are experienced with the business as well as legacy and modern programming techniques has pushed a lot of businesses up against the wall, with lost agility and in some cases delayed projects.

  As bad as that is, the situation could be worse. We have all heard the horror stories, where the executive suite or upper IT management push to switch away …

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• What Is Code Transformation Even?

  June 20, 2022 Miranda VanHorn

  Transformation is a complex concept. It can mean many different things depending on whom you are asking. It could be UI transformation, where an improvement in the user interface provides all end-users a memorable, personalized, and deeply engaging experience.

  It could also refer to code transformation, which improves the performance of applications using a new language or architecture, or it could be a total digital transformation where the system is entirely modernized for business success.

  A transformation could also mean changing a physical process of using pen and paper (e.g., documentation or signing of contracts) into a systematic approach using …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Chilli IT

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many strengths in the IBM i platform besides its hardware and software architecture or the sophistication and ease of programming embodied in its development tools. The diversity of its partner ecosystem is another strength.

  As we pointed out last March with the launch of our ongoing In The IBM i Trenches series, globally there are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, as well as thousands of suppliers of third party maintenance, of technical support, of programming and system management services, and now of hosting and cloud computing. We want to get …

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• How Kyndryl’s IBM i Customer Base Benefits from the Big Blue Split

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Now that IBM is done with the spin-out of its Global Technology Services (GTS) business, the company that resulted from that spin-out, Kyndryl, is free to pursue its own strategy. For Kyndryl’s considerable IBM i installed base, that freedom will result in a much broader array of technological options and services engagements becoming available to them.

  With 500 employees dedicated to supporting its IBM i customers, Kyndryl has one of the biggest IBM i services practices in the world, says Nicolas Le Van Dé, Kyndryl’s IBM i global offering manager.

  “I think we are the leader in terms of IBM …

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• Git Is A Whole Lot More Than A Code Repository

  March 16, 2022 Jeff Tickner

  It is funny to think that two of the most transformative technologies to hit the datacenter in the past several decades are based on projects created by Linus Torvalds. The first, of course, is the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Linux operating system and which first rolled out in 1991 but didn’t become a real server-class platform until the Dot Com Boom in the late 1990s. The second thing that Torvalds created, out of necessity to help better manage the development and patching of the open source Linux kernel, was the Git repository and version control system. …

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• Prepping For Supply Chain Crunches with Manhattan Associates

  March 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  As the provider of the warehouse management software used by many of the top brands in the country, Manhattan Associates has a better view into the current supply chain crunch than most. That shouldn’t surprise you. But what may surprise you are the actions the company has been taking for years to prepare itself and its customers for shocks not unlike the current one.

  “We’ve been really busy the last five or six years cooking up some pretty cool new things,” says Adam Kline, senior director of product management at Manhattan Associates. Kline is the product manager for WMi, …

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• New OpenLegacy Product Creates ‘Tech-Agnostic’ Services

  November 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  OpenLegacy recently announced OpenLegacy Hub, or OL Hub, a new offering designed to help customers create technology agnostic digital services from existing legacy applications and infrastructure. The offering supports IBM i and z/OS assets, among other platforms that are commonly grouped under the “legacy” banner.

  Since it appeared on the midrange scene back in 2015, OpenLegacy has been looking to help IBM i and mainframe customers extend their existing systems in new and profitable ways. Led by tech veterans from IBM and Software AG, the Israeli company created a development environment that could analyze legacy programs, such as 5250 …

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