Sunday, March 13, 2016

Zipping / Unzipping IFS Objects in IBM i

February 25, 2016 by Steve Bradshaw Leave a Comment

Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a lapsed programmer. These days I spend most of my time working at or below the IBM i Operating System layer but every now and then there is an exception that makes me dust off my coding skills and the recent need to Zip / UnZip files held in the IFS proved to be one such exception.

It started out with a simple request from a client saying that they would really like to be able to send and receive ASCII files stored in the IFS that were compressed and interchangeable with a standard Zip program on a Windows Server.

Initially I thought of cheating and just writing a script to do this from a Windows device that had the IFS folder in question mapped as a network drive. In the same moment I remember the countless times I had stood up in front of clients and user groups and told them just how flexible, open and downright fabulous IBM i is and I so realised there must be a better way. And of course there is!

QZIPUTL Service Program
Back in 2012 IBM added a service program called QZIPUTIL to v7.1 along with a couple of APIs QzipZip and QzipUnzip to IBM i, if you are running IBM i v7.2 or v7.1 with Cumulative level 2279 or higher then you will already have this.

Now, if want to ZIP / UNZIP files but you are about to abandon me as you are not an RPG developer or run on older versions of IBM i, stick around, I promise there are a couple of golden nuggets lurking just a few paragraphs further down.

Back to QZIPUTIL, to give the syntax of these APIs, the following charts are taken from the IBM Knowledge Centre. The links below them take you to those pages where you can get detailed information abouttheir usage, syntax and errors.

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_71/apis/QZIPZIP.htm

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_71/apis/QZIPUNZIP.htm

APIs are great but a command would be more useful.

APIs are of course great but for CL monkeys like myself an IBM i command would be much more useful. Ideally what we would want here are a couple of simple commands like ZIP and UNZIP.

In fact this is so startlingly fundamental, I truly don’t know why IBM did not add them. If you can think of a reason please feel free to enlighten me via the comments option at the bottom of this article. In fact the very lack of these commands was the very reason that I personally did not notice IBM had added this function to IBM i to v7.1 until just a few months ago!

Fortunately, thanks to a very generous and gifted gentleman called Carsten Flensburg, this is now possible in a matter of minutes. Carsten has created both ZIPF and UNZIPF command that you can freely download from the IBM Support website and upload to your server in minutes. Below is a link to the page on the IBM support website:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1010418

Sample ZIPF command
Once created you can simply use the ZIPF command to compress a single file or a whole series of directories, subdirectories and objects. Below is a sample screen shot from this command:

Sample UNZIPF command
The UNZIP command is just as intuitive and like the ZIPF command to decompress a single file or a whole series of directories, subdirectories and objects. Below is a sample screen shot from this command:

Compatible with Windows ZIP files
I’ve only done limited tests so far but both the APIs and the commands above work flawlessly with their Windows counterparts. Please feel free to share your experiences with this via the post a comment option at the bottom of the article.

PCI Compliance
If you are worried that you cannot use these commands as they are not directly from IBM, the good news is that Carsten included the source to all his programs and it is this source that is compiled as part of the install so you have complete visibility over the code.

Pro Tip: If want a masterclass in how to write an IBM i installer without access to a complier, just check out the script he includes for uploading these commands, it is genius!

I’m sorry to bang on about Carsten, I’ve never met him and have no working relationship with him but this is the perfect example of how to write, deliver and add function to our community. If any of you know Carsten please give him a huge IBM i hug from me!

Zipping files in older versions of IBM i
If you are not yet running v7.x of IBM i, then firstly let me remind you that you’re running on an unsupported version of the operating system but you are not totally out of luck.

If you like QSHELL then you can always use the Java Archive (JAR) command but if you like your command line environment to be a little more normal then just google IBM i Zip commands and it won’t take you long to find functions like the ZIP/UNZIP commands created by Giovanni B. Perotti which run on systems with v5.2 onwards.

Nice to see you
It was great to see so many of you at the i-UG event at the Norton Grange, in Rochdale. We will repeat that event with the same agenda in Central London at Arrow ECS’s offices in the Royal Exchange on Thursday 3rd March. Hope to see you there, more details and registration available at www.i-ug.co.uk

Thursday, December 10, 2015

The IBM i OS Contains Everything Needed to Create Web Services

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The IBM i OS Contains Everything Needed to Create Web Services

October 2014 | by Tim Rowe

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Leveraging Web services for your IBM i applications allows you to continue to use your applications of today while also enabling you to repurpose key components in other applications or as the conduit between your UI and your back-end data and key business logic.

Web services can be a key component to a modernization project on IBM i. A “service” is a callable interface/method/routine that executes some business logic. It can be complex or very simple. What makes this different is this that it’s callable from the Web, providing a highly reusable interface that can be called from anywhere.

On IBM i, using Web services has never been easier. The OS includes an integrated Web services (IWS) runtime environment. The IWS is utilized today by thousands of IBM i users for a wide array of production services. In June 2014 IBM shipped the new Liberty and JAX-WS based runtime environment. This new technology base is built on the latest industry technologies to ensure a solid base for the future. The IWS server has been built and designed with the RPG or COLBOL developer as its primary user. The IWS support not only contains the necessary runtime environment for running Web services in an enterprise production environment, it also has wizards to help RPG and COBOL developers quickly and easily create and host Web services over back-end ILE programs with virtually no knowledge of the Web side of things. The best part about this support? Because it is part of the IBM i OS, you don’t need to purchase or install anything.

Getting Started

To get started with the IWS support, it’s recommended that you have the latest HTTP PTF and Java* PTF group levels installed. This will ensure you have access to the new Liberty-based IWS engine as well as any other goodies. This support applies to all currently supported releases of IBM i. Once your PTF group levels are set, (again this is not necessary unless you want to leverage the new Liberty-based server, which I highly recommend) you can create your Web services runtime hosting environment easily by walking through the create wizard found in the left navigation pane of the Web Administration GUI (open a browser, enter http://hostname:2001/HTTPAdmin) as shown in Figure 1 (right). Once your server is created and running, which should only take a couple of minutes, you are ready to deploy your first Web service.

When it comes to creating a Web service over your RPG or COBOL programs, the hard part lies on the ILE side, where the real work needs to happen. Because you are creating a service callable from anywhere, the RPG or COBOL program needs to conform to three rules:

You have to be using an ILE version of RPG or COBOL. The older versions are just not supported with the IWS-based support.

Your function that you are creating as a service must be a stateless callable program or service program. It can’t be dependent on an input or other things.

When you compile your code, you must specify the Program Call Markup Language (PCML) option as either a program header option or on the create program command. The PCML is a special object that’s embedded with your compiled program and tells the IWS support what the input and output parameters are for you program.

Once your ILE code is set, the fun part can begin. Creating your Web services is easy. From the Web admin GUI, click on the Manage Deployed Services link. Within this interface, click the Deploy button to start the Deploy a service wizard. This wizard consists of several steps; most are for more advanced features. You really only need to care about a few:

Specify the ILE program or service program object that contains your back-end function.

Define a name for your service. The wizard provides a default value based on the name of the program you specified, but I would recommend specifying a meaningful value, as it will be beneficial later when you are trying to remember what you just did.

Specify what functions you want to expose within this Web service. You can do this in several ways: one large Web service with many functions exposed or an individual Web service for each function you want to expose. I personally am a big fan of simplicity, and would create a simple Web service for each function.

R Update the input and output fields. You will notice the fields are already defined, but likely they aren’t completely accurate. If you’re returning an output structure, for example, it will likely be marked “input/output.” It’s best if you can change that to output and then be sure to designate the correct structure return size. This ensures that the IWS wrapper code handling the call back and forth between the world of the Web and the ILE program can process that data efficiently.

Specify the user ID that this ILE program will run against.

Specify the library list that will be used. The library list can easily be updated at a later time, so here you could specify test data library to get started and then update with the production library later.

R Click on “Next” on any additional screens and hit “Finish.” Within a few seconds the wizard will create the Web services wrapper and deploy it into your Web services runtime environment.

At this point you are set and ready to go! Within the deployed service interface, is a link to the Web Services Descriptive Language. That is the object you will need to send to the caller of your Web service. Try it out for yourself; click on the Test button to launch the IWS testing interface, specify your input values and verify your Web service is working as expected.

Helpful Wizards

Getting starting creating and hosting Web services for the IBM i has never been easier. A complete set of wizards help guide you along the path. For those that are wondering, the IWS support also has a complete set of callable scripts and interfaces to give you the ability to automate or easily move these services from one system to another.

Tim Rowe is the Business Architect for Application Development responsible for all middleware and infrastructure needed for applications on IBM i. He has spent the past 8 years as an architect for the IBM i Web integration team.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Why You Might Want To Encrypt Your Syslogs Now

Why You Might Want To Encrypt Your Syslogs Now
Corrected: June 19, 2015

by Alex Woodie

Every day millions of IBM i server events are packaged up in the syslog standard and sent offsite for safekeeping and analysis. In many cases, the syslog files are sent in plain text across the wire because, hey, they're just boring old log files, and what could anybody ever do with those, right? Wrong, says IBM i security software company Raz-Lee Security.

Syslogs are a bread-and-butter data format for IT professionals around the world. Just about every device in the data center uses the syslog format to transmit data about what it's done. All sorts of IT activities are documented in syslog, from debugging applications and general systems management to real-time network alerts and security auditing.

In the security space, syslogs are the de-facto standard for sending system events to the all-important security information and event management (SIEM) products that do the hard work of analyzing and correlating activity occurring across different servers, networks, databases, switches, and various other systems. No platform is an island these days--not even the venerable IBM i server--and SIEM products like IBM's QRadar, Hewlett-Packard's ArcSight, LogRhythm's Security Intelligence, RSA Security's enVision, and Splunk's Enterprise Security are critical assets in the ongoing war against cyber criminals.

Security software companies plying the IBM i waters are no stranger to these SIEM products, and most of them are equipped to convert IBM i events--such as QAUDJRN system journal events, message queues, and user-related information--from the native IBM i format into syslog and send them across the wire to a central SIEM server.

Eli Spitz, Raz-Lee's vice president of business development, says the company decided to use TLS to encrypt syslog files at the request of customers.

"We've been asked by a number of customers, not a large number but some very large and important customers," to encrypt the syslogs, Spitz tells IT Jungle in an interview. "One of the customers is a pharmaceutical company based in Eastern Europe. They said 'We have to have encryption in syslog to be compliant with FDA regulations.' That was after we received a number of requests."

Helping customers comply with Food and Drug Administration regulations--in this case, rules that require tamper-proof lot tracking at pharmaceutical manufacturers--is certainly a good enough reason. But would companies in other industries have a reason to encrypt their syslogs?

Yes, says Raz-Lee CTO Schmuel Zailer. While you're not going to find personally identifiable information (PII) in the server logs, there are other pieces of data contained in the log files sent from production IBM i servers to SIEM and servers that could be of value to cybercriminals.

"The SIEM server collects information that's coming from the IBM i, which means your line is exposed and everybody can understand what is going on on the IBM i if you just listen to that line," Zailer says. "So you must encrypt it. And if you encrypt it, you hide it."

Raz-Lee's iSecurity suite not only sends data from QAUDJRN and other message queues; it can also upload data from the database journal, Zailer says. This is dubbed database activity monitoring (DAM), a relatively new discipline in the IBM i community, and one in which Raz-Lee has a partnership with McAfee.

For customers who choose to replicate contents of the database journal to a SIEM server via syslog--such as one large insurance company that sends thousands of database events per second--that poses an unacceptable security risk. "We send over the net information of the database updates [which] means that the database is exposed," Zailer says.

Encryption is a major theme for Raz-Lee this year. The Israeli company is gearing up to offer PGP encryption in iSecurity. It's also planning to beef up its field-level encryption offering with a major update later this year. "Encryption is emerging to be a major theme," Spitz says.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

HelpSystems Adds Security Expertise, Managed Services, and Software with Acquisition of SkyView Partners

posted Jun 2, 2015

SkyView team of industry experts, led by Carol Woodbury and John Vanderwall, join HelpSystems. Companies create powerful combination to help organizations improve security on IBM i, UNIX, and Linux.

Minneapolis, MN, June 2, 2015—HelpSystems, a leading provider of systems and network management, business intelligence, and security solutions today announced the acquisition of SkyView Partners, Inc.
By adding SkyView to HelpSystems, customers can now take advantage of a deeper bench of security experts, an innovative approach to ongoing security services, and a broader range of security products.
“At a time when demand for system security is growing and security needs are constantly changing, the SkyView team’s experience is a great fit for HelpSystems and a compelling benefit for our customers,” said Chris Heim, CEO, HelpSystems.
Numerous recent CIO surveys have identified security as a top priority for CIOs in 2015, making SkyView’s service-oriented expertise and world-class support from HelpSystems a powerful combination that will benefit all IBM i, AIX, and Linux customers.
“As we looked to expand our global security services to more customers, we sought out a security-focused company we could complement with services and we found just that in HelpSystems. Our entire team looks forward to joining the HelpSystems family,” said Carol Woodbury, President and Co-Founder of SkyView Partners, Inc.
“By combining SkyView’s services and tools with cutting-edge technology from the HelpSystems security offerings, we can help more organizations secure their systems,” said John Vanderwall, CEO and Co-Founder of SkyView Partners, Inc.
About HelpSystems
HelpSystems, LLC is a leading provider of systems and network management, business intelligence, and security and compliance solutions. HelpSystems software reduces data center costs by improving operational control and delivery of IT services. The company provides managed services around system security, with experts monitoring customers’ compliance reporting. Founded in 1982, the company has 15 offices worldwide and more than 9,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, HelpSystems sells its solutions directly and through strategic partners worldwide.
HelpSystems brands include: Robot, SEQUEL Software, PowerTech, Halcyon, Skybot, AutoMate, Safestone, Bytware, ShowCase, InterMapper, CCSS, and RJS Software. Learn more at www.helpsystems.com.
Mike Devine
Vice President, Marketing
+1 952-563-2798
mike.devine@helpsystems.com

http://www.helpsystems.com/newsroom/helpsystems-acquires-skyview-partners

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

IBM i Marketplace Survey-HelpSystems

IBM i Marketplace Survey

Find out how nearly 350 of your peers are using the platform.

We speak with IT professionals regularly about their IT infrastructures and platform changes, and we saw the need for a deeper understanding of the state of the IBM i platform. With no other source for this information, we teamed up with IT Jungle and PowerWire to gather it ourselves.
The first annual IBM i Marketplace Survey reveals how IBM i is being used and how it relates to users’ broader IT objectives.

http://www.helpsystems.com/ibm-i-marketplace-study

The IBM i Future: Hints from DB2

April 13, 2015

In a previous post about the future of IBM i, I shared some of the primary messages we give to customers who ask us things like, “Show me a roadmap for IBM i for the next five years” and “Is IBM going to support IBM i in the future?” Typically, these questions get asked by CxO types in companies—CTOs, CIOs and CEOs who don’t have much experience with IBM i and its predecessors, or who have been depending on the platform for a long time, but who have had no reason to pay close attention to the blogs, whitepapers and conference sessions we’ve been creating for the customer base. The messages from that post are often enough to calm the anxiety of CxOs, particularly if we get to deliver them in person.

However, there is more than one approach to demonstrating IBM’s strategic commitment to the IBM i and its customer base, so today I’m going to take another of those approaches, and this approach might be more meaningful to people who have more specific technical knowledge than is typically required of a day-to-day CxO. What is it?

Look at the recent past. Specifically, look at the investments IBM i development is making in technological enhancements, and ask yourself whether these investments give you an indication where the platform is headed. Today, I’ll talk about just one area of IBM i, but it’s an important area, since it’s the core of the operating system: DB2.

DB2 and the Data-centric paradigm: For several years, we’ve been talking about the benefits of a “data-centric” approach for application design. In case you’re not familiar with it, “data-centric” means that you define, in the database, how your data should be treated, so that you don’t have to ensure every application and management method you have for the data is synchronized properly. Hmmm. Maybe that’s not clear enough. Let me give you examples.

In IBM i 7.1, we made it possible to do column-level encryption, defined at the DB2 column level. By doing this, we ensured you could enforce a security policy that required specific information was always encrypted, without having to go into every piece of code, and knowing that every interface into your DB would be protected. This is data-centric encryption. Similarly, in IBM i 7.2 we introduced Row/Column Access Control, which is also data-centric. It gets defined for the entire database, no matter how the data is accessed. And when 7.2 TR2 and 7.1 TR10 get announced, there’s another DB2 feature that allows more data-centric management, reducing the complexity of managing your DB2, by having DB2 do things for you.

In each of these instances, we’re guiding the solution community toward a data-centric approach, because ultimately it makes it easier for customers, and it provides more opportunity for us to optimize DB2 for our customers. We see a future where people will use DB2 more and more, as they have in the past, but they will want to avoid complex and error-prone methods of securing, managing and designing their database. And we’re investing in that future.

First on DB2 for i: Furthermore, some of the features we’re putting into DB2 for i are features that other members of the DB2 family will get, but they don’t have them yet. Regular expression support from TR1/TR9 was one example where the IBM i DB2 implementation was the first DB2 to support it, and the feature I hinted at above is another example of a DB2 feature that will be delivered on IBM i first. So, IBM i is not just investing, it’s remaining a full partner with other DB2 family members, doing functions that support the future of database use before anyone else.

Integration of XML: XML, of course, is a way to describe data. DB2 stores data. XML is a big deal. DB2 is big deal. Of course, if you’re an operating system like IBM i, built around DB2, and you want to enable yourself for the future, you figure out how you’re going to work with XML, or not. In the context of investing for the future, realize that we had a choice. We could have allowed XML support to remain a job for application developers. Integrating the support into DB2 would provide significant value to developers, and it would support that “data-centric” strategy I mentioned before, but it also would mean we were committing to supporting a pretty extensive data description technology well into the future. So what did IBM i decide to do?

At first, the IBM i DB2 first added support to store and use XML in a very general way. Then, more than five years ago, over the course of several mid-release deliverables and a major release, DB2 on i incorporated advanced XML support integrated directly into the database. It was one of the major enhancements in 7.1, and has been extended several times since then.

XML is still necessary, of course. Plenty of people use it. But these days, it’s not the only “big deal” in data description. XML is powerful, but pretty complicated when comparing it to at least one other popular technology. (Do I hear someone in the audience asking about JSON? Yes, I thought I did.) So, what are we going to do? Hmmmm. I guess we could do nothing. If IBM i didn’t have a future, doing nothing would probably be best. Why tie ourselves to another growing new data-related technology if we can’t continue to support it? On the other hand, since IBM i does have a future—well, you can expect more news in this area.

More: Other aspects of DB2 show continued investment, for the future of our customers, but those aspects might cross over into other future blogs, so let me just say that Services through SQL has been a focus of IBM i for quite some time (Dawn May wrote about it here: http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Blogs/i-Can/March-2015/IBM-i-Services/ ) and then there is all the support we have created to help users Modernize the use of DB2, which is covered extensively in the IBM i Modernization Redbook.

In closing (for today—not forever) let me reiterate: there are many ways to talk about the future of IBM i and each of those ways might be more effective to certain groups of people. If you are a technical person and you are asked by your executive if IBM is saying anything about the future of IBM i, then I suggest you point them to the previous blog and the resources it mentions.

On the other hand, if you are a technical person and you get the same question from another technical person, information about the technical investments being made in IBM i might serve you better. And if DB2 isn’t the right technology to talk about, well, then you can wait for me to write about other parts of IBM i. Or, better yet, think about the new things you’ve seen us announce over the past few years and develop a list of things that means the most to you. Because when you’re face-to-face with a doubter, the best position you can take is one that you believe in, and you do that best with facts that mean something to you.

Until next time, I’ll keep heading into the future. I look forward to seeing you there!

Posted April 13, 2015 | Permalink

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Look Ahead With IBM To 2018

Look Ahead With IBM To 2018
Published: March 16, 2015

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The world today is a much different place from the one that the AS/400 was launched into nearly three decades ago. Back then, it was exotic to be moving from basic accounting systems running on batch oriented machines to real-time transaction processing and database querying using relational database technology. It was also a big deal to be moving away from homegrown software to packaged applications tailored to specific industries. Software is far more complex and so are the systems it runs across, and IBM reflects the complexity of the market it serves.

Ever since it nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, IBM has been obsessed--many would say correctly--with continual self-transformation. The company did far too much navel-gazing back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the AS/400 business was launched and growing and an important part of the revenue and profit picture for Big Blue, and IBM missed many opportunities.

If anything, IBM is perhaps a little too hair trigger to dump a business and chase the hottest new thing through acquisitions and a little bit of research and engineering internally, but IBM does not have anything even close to a monopoly in any part of the IT business these days (excepting mainframes and IBM i platforms, if you want to have a very tight market definition) and it has to chase growth where it can find it.

The question you have to ask is how IBM is aligning with your business and how you might be aligning with IBM's business. IBM has been giving Wall Street some insight into where it will be in 2018, thirty years after the AS/400 was launched and something that feels more like a millennium in IT time.

By now, you all know the mantra of the markets that IBM is pursuing with its "strategic initiatives."

Come on, chant it along with me as we could all have perhaps done at IBM's recent Investor Briefing event for Wall Street analysts. Let's say it together: Cloud, Data, Mobile & Social, and Security. (IBM actually pronounces it with an ampersand, which is a neat trick.)

These strategic businesses represented about $25 billion in revenues in 2014, comprising 27 percent of the company's revenues from the year, up from 13 percent in 2010.

"That $25 billion is a big business, even for IBM," Schroeter explained. "You have to have a B at the end to be relevant, but this $25 billion is absolutely relevant for us and for our clients."

Schroeter noted that the mix of that the mix of software in the revenues for these strategic imperative markets was around 50 percent, which is much greater than the percentage of software revenues for IBM at large. "So we have growth above the level of the market and the ability to scale even by our standards and the ability to craft a solution that is high value." IBM's growth rates in these combined social, mobile, security, big data, and cloud segments were roughly double the industry average from 2010 through 2014, too, so IBM is pretty sure it is running its business right.

Hardware, Schroeter noted, was about 10 percent of that strategic imperative pie in 2014, and services was around 40 percent.

To make his point, Schroeter said that eight years ago, IBM identified analytics as a key growth area, and now that business generates $17 billion in sales for the company. (He did not say what the baseline was eight years ago or how much money IBM had spent acquiring assets like Cognos, SPSS, Netezza and many others to buy a big chunk of that revenue growth.) IBM's hardware take for its analytics biz is about 10 percent, software is about 55 percent, and services is around 35 percent. This market is pegged at a $315 billion opportunity, and growing at around 7 percent per year between now and 7 percent. IBM's growth in the analytics business is keeping pace at 7 percent growth last year.

When it comes to cloud, there is no hardware sale at all, with the $7 billion cloud business last year being around 30 percent software and around 70 percent services. (There is plenty of hardware cost in this business, mind you.) IBM's software-as-a-service products, of which there are over 100 these days, have an annual run rate of about $3.5 billion, and are one reason why the cloud business at Big Blue is growing at 60 percent year-on-year. The cloud market opportunity that IBM is in love with has around a $400 billion total addressable market in 2018, and is growing at 23 percent compounded annually between now and then.

The engagement business--which includes mobile at $1 billion in sales, social at around $1 billion, and security at more than $1.5 billion--grew at more than 35 percent in 2014. At this pace, IBM will gain market share in this engagement business, which it pegs at $290 billion in 2018 and growing at 10 percent across the industry.

Looking out ahead, after making its forecasts, IBM is telling Wall Street that it can push $40 billion in revenues in these strategic initiatives by 2018, which will represent more than 40 percent of its total revenues. That is another way of saying that IBM will grow to be an approximately $100 billion company again by 2018, which is not huge revenue growth, but the strategic initiatives will fill in the gaps. Ginny Rometty, IBM's somewhat beleaguered chairman and CEO, has told Wall Street that scaling up the SoftLayer cloud and the applications that run on it will actually boost its earnings, but IBM has not said much about how profitable these other areas are within its strategic imperatives.

The interesting tidbit that Schroeter revealed in his presentation at the Investor Briefing was that 80 percent of IBM's customers buy all three of the elements of its product portfolio--hardware, software, and services.

Schroeter talked up how the mainframe continues to be strategic in core industries like banking, and he talked about how Citibank uses IBM System z and Power Systems iron to run virtually all of its applications, and that the bank is also a big user of its systems software and middleware. And to show the relationship between services and the Power Systems business, he explained that IBM Power Systems machines are behind about 550 million subscribers in the telecommunications industry in India, and amazingly, that all of this Power iron is delivered through a set of strategic outsourcing agreements with the big telcos in that country. (Why IBM has not mentioned this before is a bit of a mystery.) By the way, those Power machines are supporting about half of the telco subscribers in the entire country, which are mostly using mobile phones supplied by Bharti Airtel, Vodaphone India, and Idea Cellular.

Looking ahead, IBM believes that its "annuity like" software revenue stream--meaning subscriptions for software and support contracts--accounts for 70 percent of its revenues per year. IBM can count on it more or less like clockwork so long as customers don't shift their systems quickly. (Which very few enterprises can.) That annuity-like software business is growing at 3 percent a year, but the SaaS portion is growing at more like 70 percent. Larger customers are not doing software transactions the way they used to do in the past; they want subscriptions.

"For hardware, we have been saying for a while that our model is stable and profitable," explained Schroeter. "We have made tremendous, tremendous progress in turning what was a $1.7 billion decline in profit in Systems and Technology Group in 12 months, and we made a profit in the fourth quarter and we see pretty good growth coming out of that portfolio in 2015." IBM now has Power8 out for the first full quarter and the new System z13 mainframes ramping, too. As for storage, more of the value is shifting to software and away from hardware, both Rometty and Schroeter said in their presentations.

While this is all technically true, it is also a bit off the mark. Functions that are now sold as separate items in software are packaged as separate software features in storage arrays, and frankly, this is a change in packaging that is meant to aggrandize Software Group and hurts Systems and Technology Group. The same is true of the past two decades of Global Services taking a slice of what is really systems revenue.

If IBM wanted to show the real strength of the System z and Power Systems businesses, it would talk about them as a complete stack, with revenues for these platforms marked as such and software and services sales for other company's systems being kept in a separate set of buckets. I don't care about IBM's books, per se, but when IBM's executives and customers are making decisions based on the categories IBM chooses when it classifies its revenues and profits, it starts to matter. IBM is a systems company--80 percent of its customers buy all of its segments--and its bookkeeping and presentations should reflect that. Only then can the company, its customers, and its investors make sound decisions. My guess is that if IBM did that, it would show that System z and Power Systems sales have been subsidizing sales for software and services on other platforms, and that would raise all kinds of hell.

As far as IBM i customers are concerned, the message coming out of IBM is that the Power Systems business is being transformed such that it is all "high value" and has an intellectual property component, too, thanks to the OpenPower Foundation, which is opening up the Power systems stack to take on the hegemony of the X86 platform in the datacenter.

I will be attending the OpenPower Summit, the very first one, in San Jose this week, and I will be listening very carefully to how the Power ecosystem is expanding after being opened up. I will also be pressing IBM and its partners to open it up in ways that benefit the IBM i platform directly, rather than indirectly just by the strengthening and widening of the Power platform outside of Big Blue. OpenPower has been limited to Linux thus far, and I think IBM i and AIX should be brought into the fold. There is no technical reason why AIX and IBM i can't be ported to a bare metal OpenPower machine or a virtual one running OpenKVM.

Maybe what IBM needs to do is make a new AS/400. I will ponder that one my trip out to San Jose.

IBM i (iSeries, AS/400)

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Zipping / Unzipping IFS Objects in IBM i

Zipping / Unzipping IFS Objects in IBM i

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