You’re reading IBM i Pulse, our weekly bite-sized roundup of the latest headlines in the IBM i industry. Let's get straight to it!

Profound Survey Adds To 'Why i Matters' Discussion
by Dan Burger

This edition starts off with an IT Jungle story featuring our recent IBM i Modernization survey results. You can pre-register for the white paper where we go in-depth into the responses and dissect developers vs. upper management viewpoints on the IBM i. It'll be released sometime next week!

• "Profound Logic, one of the leading application development tool vendors in the IBM i community, shared a glimpse at a soon to be released white paper with IT Jungle based on its recently completed modernization survey."
• "The top complaint from developers was the negative perception of the IBM i platform that is held by company executives, which results in a reluctance to invest in IBM i."
• "From the business executives' perspective, the cost of modernization was their biggest concern. It's unclear whether the cost of modernization will result in maintaining the status quo, reducing the scope of modernization, or investigating the cost of migration to another platform"

   

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011816-story03.html

Eye on the i World
by John Ghrist

• "It's probably difficult to find an IBM i developer or IT manager who hasn't at some point lost sleep over the possibility that a C-level fiat, or another action beyond their control, might find them facing a mandate to change platforms away from the IBM i."
• "'It's important to emphasize the IBM i's strengths,' Seeney maintains. 'Above all else, the IBM i is known to be a secure processor, which is a key element when opening up the processor to the Internet. Moreover, it has a great database in DB2 and an HTTP server that makes it a great web server.'"
• "Modernization of core applications is the key to continued viability for the IBM i. You already have everything you need to do web development on the i."

Source: http://www.mcpressonline.com/commentary/eye-on-the-i-world.html

Round Three of IBM i Predictions for 2016

by Alex Woodie

• "The one constant in this universe is change, and the IBM i business is no different. The server platform is now in its fourth decade of service, counting go back to the System/3 days, and the pace of technological change in the business IT sector demands agility at many levels."
• "'I advise RPG programmers to learn PHP, VB.Net, HTML, JQuery along with other open source tools. They need to convince their C-level execs why they need to update all--not just some--of the old legacy code to ILE and free. IBM needs to gear more advertising about the advantages of the best platform they have for SMBs to grow with.'"
• "'The one thing I can add. . . is that I foresee larger enterprise modernization efforts becoming more popular. What I mean by enterprise modernization is going beyond modernizing the interface only. It involves modernizing all aspects of an IBM i system...'"

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh012016-story03.html

New Year's Resolutions for RPG Programmers
by David Shirley

"It's that time of the year again for us to resolve how this year will be different from last. So what should be at the top of the list for the modern IBM i professional?"

• Start Using /Free
• Embrace ILE
• Learn a New i Skill
• and more...

Source: http://www.mcpressonline.com/rpg/new-year-s-resolutions-for-rpg-programmers.html

Where Do Those IBM i Machines Work?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

• "We may live in a big data world, but a lot of the data is not worth the magnetic media it is stored on. This is particularly true when it comes to the IBM i installed base, which used to be more aggressively diced and sliced by the big IT market researchers of the world back it was called the AS/400 and when it had a $14 billion ecosystem across hardware, software, and services."
• "I just wanted to see if the customer distribution had any shape to the economy at large back then, and I repeated the experiment with the IBM i survey data collected by HelpSystems for the 2016 IBM i Marketplace Survey."
• "I don't claim this data is perfect, it is really just a way to talk about how the base compares to the economy as both are changing. As I said during the webinars, if the IBM i base looked exactly like the AS/400 base from years gone by, this would be the cause for concern."

Source: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011816-story05.html

How Much Do You Really Know About Modern RPG Programming?
by Rafael Victoria-Pereira

• "ILE RPG and free-format have been around for years. However, not everyone is taking advantage of these and other features of modern RPG."
• "Modern RPG implies modular and structured programming techniques: using modules and service programs, procedures, functions, and so on. However, using procedures and functions generally requires passing parameters between them."

Source: http://www.mcpressonline.com/rpg/how-much-do-you-really-know-about-modern-rpg-programming.html

And that's it for this week! Let me know if we missed anything and I'll be sure to add it.

Don't forget to pre-register for our 2016 State of IBM i Modernization white paper.