• ARCAD Breaks Up Monolithic Code With New Transformer Tool

  June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There are many different aspects to application modernization: moving from 5250 greenscreens to Web interfaces, adopting the SQL database engine, and using DevOps techniques. Another part of modernization is breaking up monolithic codebases into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be more readily integrated using APIs and Web services, and that’s the goal of a new version of its Transformer product line launched recently by ARCAD Software.

  ARCAD Software already offers several capabilities under its Transformer brand, including Transformer RPG for converting fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG; Transformer DB for converting DDS files to modern DDL tables; Transformer Field for …

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• LightEdge Acquires Connectria To Round Out Each Other’s Power Play

  April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is a large group of IT customers who pay a premium for a premium product but who are also going to be experiencing a skills shortage in the coming years, then you want to be in the position of selling them networking, compute, and storage capacity in the cloud or in co-location facilities. And you also want to be able to sell them add-on managed services to get a bigger share of their overall budget while also helping them to get more things done.

  That, in a nutshell, is why LightEdge Solutions is acquiring Connectria Hosting. Both companies …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• Is The Cloud On Your IBM i Horizon?

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s almost impossible to ignore the enormous pull that the cloud is exerting on the software industry today. Companies that run the IBM i server are also subject to that gravity, although it has different ramifications for their technological future, as well as the decisions they’ll make if they want to run their operations in the cloud.

  IBM i shops, almost by definition, are not running on the cloud today, at least not in the public cloud the way it is normally defined. While there are a handful of managed service providers (MSPs) offering private cloud IBM i runtimes, and …

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• Merlin Subscriptions Picking Up, IBM and ARCAD Say

  September 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Hundreds of IBM i shops have adopted Merlin since it was released last year, according to IBM and ARCAD, which jointly developed the development and code management tool. The addition of a subscription offering in early 2023 significantly bolstered sales activity, the companies say.

  “In this last six months or so, we have really seen it tick up, which is exactly what we are expecting,” says IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill, on the Merlin adoption curve.

  Sales were a bit slow coming out of the gate for Merlin, the novel, browser-based environment for application development and change management on …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Big Blue’s New “WebSpheres” To Surf The Container And AI Waves

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, there is a lot of money that can be made on AI training and inference, as is aptly shown by the financial results of Nvidia. That company, which is the darling of Wall Street these days, has gone from datacenter wannabe to datacenter giant in the course of a decade and a half. It has been fascinating to watch, but it is as much the result of lucky timing as hard work, as Jensen Huang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, admitted from the beginning.

  Nvidia has been working on parallel computing architectures for accelerating HPC workloads …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• 7 Reasons To Be Thankful For IBM i

  November 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Despite problems around the nation, Americans still have a lot to be thankful for. We have really good schools, a strong U.S. dollar, and a tech sector that’s the envy of the world. And while the IBM i server plays a smaller role in the day-to-day running of our country than it used to, there are still many reasons to be thankful for platform.

  IT Jungle will take a break from publishing next week to rest, eat turkey, and think about what we’re thankful for, which definitely includes the IBM i. Thankfully, we have prepared a list ahead of time …

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• A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

  First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

  When …

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