• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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• Security Threats, They Are a Changin’

  November 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Ransomware came into 2021 like a lion, but rather than going out like a lamb, it seemed to get bigger and meaner. Even IBM i shops, which so often are protected from the wider security storm, felt the panic and sense of helplessness of having their previous data held for ransom. But early indications are that the security threat we’re talking about this time next year may be entirely different.

  It’s tough to overestimate the impact that ransomware had on American businesses and other institutions through the course of the year. We had indications that something big was unfolding a …

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• Guru: Flexible Interfaces

  November 1, 2021 Ted Holt

  The details are murky, it’s been eons ago. Probably the mid-1990’s. I was working on an AS/400 that ran a mixture of System/36 and native applications. I needed to call a program that had been written in the latest version of RPG from both S/36 RPG II and native RPG III (a.k.a. RPG/400) programs. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. It’s been so long.

  The problem I ran into was rooted in a numeric parameter. S/36 programs passed numeric parameters in zoned decimal format, whereas native RPG and CL programs used packed decimal. The called program defined the parameter as …

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• Remain Bolsters Change Management Suite

  October 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the market for change management software? One of the most active vendors in the IBM i space, Remain Software, this month announced the delivery of several new releases of its software, including TD/OMS version 14, Gravity version 7, and a new release of its API Studio.

  Remain develops and supports its application lifecycle management (ALM) software for IBM i and open system platforms out of its headquarters in The Netherlands. It has several partners in the United States and other countries, giving it a global reach with its flagship TD/OMS offering and supporting cast of tools.

  In early October, …

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• HelpSystems Goes Phishing For Cyber Threat Hunter

  October 25, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems dipped into the security pond again with its acquisition last week of PhishLabs, a Canadian company that develops technology designed to protect organizations from various Internet-based threats, including malicious emails, account takeover, and data leakage. As is the case with most of HelpSystems’ acquisitions, its IBM i customer are expected to be among the beneficiaries.

  For over a decade, PhishLabs has been developing a security platform designed to find and identify and counteract threats to customers. As its name suggests, the company got its start with identifying phishing attacks. Its founder and chief technology officer, John LaCour, grew frustrated …

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• Planning A Modernization Project? Read This First

  October 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Modernization means a lot of things to a lot of people. If you happen to ask Chris Koppe, the senior vice president of strategy, transformation, and modernization services at Fresche Solutions, what modernization means to him, get ready to spend the next hour listening to his response.

  That’s the approximate length of Koppe’s recent presentation at the POWERUp conference, titled Developing Your Modernization Plan: What Are Your Options? and it’s worth every second. Koppe explored the topic in such breadth and depth that we though it was worth highlighting his main points. Of course, if you’re a COMMON member and …

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• The Ease Of API Programming Has To Be Balanced By Heightened API Security

  October 18, 2021 Brian May

  If you have modernized legacy applications or created new applications from scratch, you very likely have application programming interfaces, or APIs, exposed to enable applications to share data. To some ways of thinking, this sharing of data between chunks of code in a formalized way – within the organization or across code bases developed internally or created by third parties and residing on premises, in the cloud somewhere, or both – is what actually constitutes an application. The integrated whole is what makes everything work.

  By their very nature, therefore, APIs are a boon to companies looking to weave together …

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• Every IBM i Shop Must Have An API Integration Strategy

  October 6, 2021 Daniel Magid

  I have had several very exciting conversations with IBM i users recently about new technology as they have reached out to Eradani for help in advancing their IBM i applications using APIs. More and more I hear how IBM i pros are learning new things and innovating to transform their IBM systems into examples of leading-edge computing. One of the cool things IBM i users are recognizing is that the value of APIs comes not just from making IBM i data available to other applications and outside users, but also from adding additional function to RPG applications by calling out …

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• Db2 PTF Group Enhancements Target Web Services, Audit Journal

  October 4, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It is indisputable that the Db2 for i database is the beating heart of the IBM i platform. There were no earthshattering enhancements to this database in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 that IBM announced and shipped last month. But there were a few items worth mentioning that shipped in the Db2 PTF Group, including new HTTP commands for calling the database via REST and new SQL-based commands for querying the security audit journal.

  The top new Db2 for i feature arguably is the new set of functions for HTTP requests to consume …

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• Rocket Maps IBM i Apps for Modernization Ventures

  September 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops want to start modernizing their applications, but they don’t know where to start. One possible beginning is a new software offering called Rocket Process Insights that that documents how IBM i applications work, and provides a heatmap and statistics that show which screens are the most commonly used.

  The new offering, which Rocket Software unveiled last week, has been a long time in coming, according to Chris Wey, the president of the company’s Power Systems Business Unit. “It’s a brand-new solution from the company and we’re really excited about it,” he told IT Jungle. “It’s …

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