• Rocket Launches New DevOps Solution for IBM i

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week took the covers off a newly branded solution aimed at bringing IBM i development processes into the future. Dubbed Rocket DevOps, the offering is based on the existing Rocket Aldon offering and is designed to enable IBM i shops to adopt the latest CI/CD development and operations practices. The suite also will welcome a new testing solution next month.

  Rocket DevOps was created to be a soup-to-nuts DevOps solutions that gives development and delivery teams everything they need to develop and deploy high quality and secure IBM i code in an efficient manner. In addition to …

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• Remain Unifies Its Products with New Framework, Dubbed ‘Octo’

  March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Remain Software have been cranking out the code all winter, and the fruits of their labor are now here for all to view. Chief among the new deliverables is Octo, which the Dutch company describes as a Web-based orchestration layer and framework that will unite its various products and provide a common dashboard. Updates of other products, including the flagship TD/OMS offering, are now available, too.

  The headliner for Remain Software’s second milestone delivery of the current release cycle (which spans from summer to summer) arguably is Octo. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo …

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• The Real IBM i Legacy Is The People

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I will never for the life of me understand why the word “legacy” has such a bad connotation in the IT business when in all other aspects of life it means something good. We talk about legacy systems, usually systems of record, a lot here at The Four Hundred, because we are focused on the AS/400 platform and its successors over the past three and a half decades. But the applications – and the people who extend and support them – that run on modern IBM i iron and some vintage predecessor systems have a heritage that extends back …

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• Learning To Drive Fast On The DevOps Roadmap

  January 31, 2022 Andrew Ireland

  Maturity doesn’t come with the passing of time, but with experience, whatever age you may start doing something. So it is with DevOps. In many ways IBM i teams have been ‘ahead of their time’, deploying small code increments to production fast and often.  However we are seeing that requirements in integration and hybrid cloud are pushing the boundaries in DevOps transformation, and that to avoid costly, high-risk migration projects in the future it is important to act now and start taking further steps on that IBM i DevOps maturity journey.

  Full DevOps maturity depends on sharing development methods and …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Building Organizational Resilience in the Digital Age

  January 17, 2022 Maxime Leclair

  There is so much change happening in the world and technology is playing a critical role. Organizations must use modern digital solutions if they want to survive and thrive amid uncertainty and accelerate growth in an aggressively competitive business landscape.

  Climate change, COVID-19, global and financial crises, among other things, have exposed vulnerabilities in businesses and accelerated the need for new digital capabilities, modern systems, and processes as well as optimized and transformed legacy systems. According to research, 63 percent of organizations flag digital transformation, including building up technological infrastructure and data analytics as top strategic priorities for the …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 1

  January 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  While the month and year ostensibly are just values in the date field, when the calendar flips over from December to January, things feel different. There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism for what the new year will bring. Coming off another calamitous year filled with COVID-19, perhaps it’s we need that even more so this year.

  It has become an IT Jungle tradition to ask members of the IBM i community at the start of the year for their predictions. This year is no different, and so we’ll kick off the first part of our (most likely) two-part …

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• Original and Midrange Dynamics in IBM i Test Tie-Up

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the fast-paced world of DevOps, it’s critical to test your applications in a timely fashion. The quicker you can spot bugs and other issues, the quicker you can fix them and get the new features into production. That’s the gist behind a new partnership recently unveiled by Original Software and Midrange Dynamics, two of the leading providers of DevOps and test automation tooling, respectively.

  On September 30, the two vendors announced they have entered into a partnership that will not only see them marketing to their respective customer bases, but also integrating their respective offerings to deliver, as they …

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• Expanding Fields Is A Bigger Pain In The Neck Than You Think

  October 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  Remember the Y2K problem, when companies had two-digit dates for years in their applications and the millennial turn was coming and they suddenly needed a four-digit date so all the math would work out right comparing the present, future, and past? Well, every time you need to change a field length in your source code – which almost always means making it bigger, not shorter – you have to suffer through a mini Y2K crisis.

  Yes, the Y2K crisis did not bring an end to civilization as we knew it, as some were prognosticating and maybe a few were hoping, …

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• Value Stream Management: Bringing Lean Manufacturing Techniques To IBM i Development

  September 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  When resources are tight, it is important to optimize their usage and maximize the business value they deliver. This is the very foundation of what is called lean manufacturing or just-in-time manufacturing, which more than a few IBM i shops know a thing or two about because this platform has been used for decades by process and discrete manufacturers to automate their businesses.

  The move toward DevOps has allowed software engineers to adopt many of the best practices developed by manufacturing over the last 100 years. These include automating the flow of code, a repository of standard components and a …

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• Quest For The Hybrid Grail: Getting To A Frictionless Cloud

  August 16, 2021 Satya Sharma

  Grail quests have always been a motif in literature and entertainment, and they most always come about because of an existential threat to the heroes seeking the mystical relic. In many ways, grail quests are also equally common in the business world. Businesses have found that a highway to accelerate their quest is embracing hybrid cloud, which recent studies have shown to offer 2.5 times greater value than a public cloud only deployment. But not all hybrid cloud platforms are created equal.

  In an IDC post titled The Road to Hybrid Multicloud, the market researcher explains that “the Holy …

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