• Maxava Strengthens Leadership Team With Key Appointments

  July 15, 2024 John Dominic

  As Maxava positions itself for continued growth and innovation around the world, we are thrilled to announce several key appointments that will enhance our leadership team. These strategic moves are designed to strengthen our operational capabilities, meet complex customer demands, and expand our international market presence in HA/DR, multi-platform monitoring and security.

  Sheena Bernard has been promoted to vice president of operations. In her new role, Sheena will oversee the technical, development, and services teams, ensuring that Maxava continues to deliver innovative solutions and support to our clients. Sheena has extensive commercial, business improvement, and operational management expertise, having previously …

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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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• DR Testing As A Service: One More Thing That You Don’t Have To Do

  September 25, 2023 David Fahrenkrug

  If not having a disaster recovery plan for your IBM i system is scary to think about – and clearly a lot of IBM i shops are not thinking about it beyond restoring from tape or virtual tape library because if they did, they would get together a disaster recovery plan – then maybe between the fifth and tenth most scary things in the datacenter today is actually making sure that the disaster recovery software works and the plan for recovery in the event of something going haywire actually works.

  High availability clustering and disaster recovery software is, by necessity, …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Remote Managed Services Fill In For Retiring And Overburdened IT Staff

  July 10, 2023 Raymond Hammell

  If you manage an IT department, you’ve likely received that dreaded 2am phone call, or you’ve had to hire someone to replace a retiring IBM i systems administrator. And, if you’re like most IBM i professionals, you probably wish you had more time to focus on strategic activities (or take a vacation!) instead of worrying about day-to-day systems maintenance.

  Managing IBM i environments requires a specific set of skills that can be hard to come by, leaving IT departments struggling to keep up with growing infrastructure, data volumes and business demands. Tedious maintenance and repetitive tasks add to the burden …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

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• Using The Public Cloud For IBM i Disaster Recovery

  April 24, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Disasters can strike at any time, and it’s essential for organizations to have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. However, creating and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, particularly for organizations that rely on IBM i servers, often running business critical applications that perform key functions together with many interfaces into other servers and applications.

  Previously, investments in IBM i disaster recovery solutions were an expensive outlay, requiring significant capital investment in both hardware and software, in addition to the sizable costs associated with running a datacenter.

  Fortunately, with the advent …

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• Security Still Top Concern, IBM i Marketplace Study Says

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security continues to be the number one concern of IBM i shops surveyed for the annual IBM i Marketplace Study conducted by Fortra. Application modernization surged ahead from last year’s finish to make the race for number one interesting, while HA/DR and IBM i skills rounded out the top four concerns.

  Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) formally released its 2023 IBM i Marketplace Study last week, making it the ninth straight year that the company has released the study. This year’s study, which you can access here, is based on surveys taken last year by about 300 individuals from the IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: How To Optimize IT In 2023

  January 16, 2023 Jeff Swartz

  It should be no surprise to anyone that applications running on IBM i are business critical. In many cases, these crucial systems keep the business alive day-to-day. Working with organizations around the globe, we are seeing a lot of activity happening in the IBM i space to optimize operations and put in new workload models. Many IT organizations are looking at upgrading. This includes implementing tech refreshes and moving to Power10 systems.

  Now is the time really to think about what the ideal model is for where to run which applications.

  Historically, when companies looked at infrastructure upgrades, they would …

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• Myth Buster: Changing Your HA/DR Software Is Not Hard Work!

  November 9, 2022 Ash Giddings

  With inflation putting an added squeeze on IT spend, now is the right time to look at potential HA/DR alternatives. But, given its importance, you need to ensure that you are improving your resilience, and not trading off functionality, performance, and support to make savings.

  Logical replication, for high availability and disaster recovery, has been the “go-to” technology for many years, and is still very much the leading approach within the IBM i community.

  Nervousness about what costs, implementation effort and trade-offs may be required to change HA/DR solutions, means that many organizations simply rollover the status quo. In doing …

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• Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

  July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through business, changing the way companies operate and resetting customer expectations. Businesses that can’t keep up with these evolving needs face long-term headwinds in terms of competitiveness. Implementing a modernization strategy is paramount for companies in these situations, but where do you start?

  While business closures from COVID-19 were bad, they could have been a lot worse. A 2021 study released by the Federal Reserve concluded that 200,000 establishments closed as a result of the pandemic. That was lower than a study from a year earlier that found 400,000 establishments could close. “Actual exit is …

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