Are you worried about the future of the IBM i at your company? Do users complain that it looks “old”? Are you losing IBM i experts to retirement and finding it difficult locate skilled replacements? If so, you are not alone. According to the latest Help Systems IBM i marketplace survey (https://www.helpsystems.com/resources/guides/ibm-i-marketplace-survey-results), three of the
I spoke recently with an IBM i Engineer who had become frustrated with the difficulty she was having in getting her business executives to understand the value of investing in APIs for their IBM i applications. She was looking for help in how to show the business return on investment from APIs. Together, we were
Top Five Ways APIs Will Transform Your Business:
Finding the ROI in APIs Read More »
“I feel like I have been working with hand tools and somebody just gave me a power saw and drill.” That’s how a customer described to me his experience of building web services and APIs in JavaScript for his IBM i applications. “Don’t get me wrong”, he said, “I still love RPG and we will
Warp Speed Modernization with JavaScript and APIs Read More »
Is it possible to be working with IBM i and not even know it? You bet! Is that a good thing? Yes. I often talk to executives of companies who are considering leaving IBM i. When I ask them why, a common answer is that IBM i is an outlier. It works differently than everything
Last week CNN printed an article highlighting the struggles of several state governments to handle the tsunami of unemployment claims in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. The culprit? The decades-old COBOL applications running on their mainframe systems. Phil Murphy, the Governor of New Jersey even put out a call for ‘volunteer’ COBOL programmers, lamenting
IBM i—Live Long and Prosper (Just Add Open Source) Read More »
I was visiting an IBM i customer recently for a presentation on IBM i “modernization”. After the presentation, I got the opportunity to spend time with their business end users. I asked them what IT could do for them to help them do their jobs more effectively and to serve their customers better. The customer
It is time for us (IBM i IT professionals) to drive new technology initiatives. Every day, I speak with IBM i users who, like me, are passionate about the platform and completely frustrated that their bosses can’t seem to understand the value of the most reliable, most secure, easiest to run platform on the planet.
I Have Seen the Enemy—And it is Us (And I Say that with Love) Read More »
Way back in the early 1980s, when I worked for IBM, I used to teach a class in application design concepts for the System/38 (the precursor to the IBM i). In that class I taught programmers that, for performance reasons, they should write big monolithic programs that comprised all the steps of an entire business