Market Watch: AI, Blockchain, Python and IBM i Modernization

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

News: Ginni Rometty, says AI will change everything. PayPal invests in blockchain.
AI: Things you need to know about Data and AI. The AI leadership challenge.
Development: A new language for the IBM i. Python overtakes Javascript.
Leadership: Nurture your internal thought leaders & You don't have to be a CEO to lead.
Modernization: The Application Services market in 2023. Legacy Web Applications.
Trends: The most hyped technologies. Are they for real?

News

IBM CEO Says That AI Will Change 100% of Jobs over the next decade "IBM’s Chair, CEO and President Ginni Rometty has a powerful message for workers and employers in all strata of society: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and it is shaping up to be one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our lifetime." This article covers three key areas:

Industry 4.0 and the mix of AI, data, and analytics
IBM's role in dealing with the Skills Gap
The push for building an apprenticeship model to train the workers of the future

Each one of the above are important for the IBM i community. The first one addresses the use of technology and digital transformation. The second and third, highlight a framework that can be modeled to teach and train the future generation of workers. PayPal Makes It's First Investment in Blockchain "As part of the investment, PayPal's first in blockchain, the company is exploring how it might use Cambridge Blockchain’s platform to let its users prove who they are while still preventing personal information from being unnecessarily shared." Why is this important? It shows that enterprises, like PayPal, see the value that blockchain technology can bring to the financial services industry. In this case, Cambridge Blockchain helps financial institutions deal with data privacy (Digital Privacy), Compliance as well as GDPR.

AI

4 Things you need to know about Big Data and AI "In the seven years since IBM’s Watson beat two human champions in the game show Jeopardy, cognitive technologies have gone from a science fiction pipe-dream to a platform for essential business initiatives." But, as the article points out while there have been successes there have also been many failures along the way. That's okay because progress has never been easy. Here are four things that will help you on your journey. AI and the Leadership Challenge

“Technological disruptions are defining this era of rapid business transformation and driving a set of deep-rooted questions about the future of work, the implications for organizations, management, and employees and how we can navigate to the ‘next horizon’.”

This article explores a number of questions and the different possible scenarios that could emerge in a world where our reality and sense of the possible is being redefined on a daily basis.

Development

What will the new language be for the IBM i? There have been a number of new languages introduced to the IBM i over the course of the past decade or so. In addition to RPG, the platform already supports PHP, Python, Perl, Node.js as well as .NET. And now, “some IBMers have said that they’re working on porting Go to the IBM i.” As this article points out, adding additional development languages to the platform is a good thing. It provides a new source for talent as well as brings new opportunities to the RPG Developer. Here is more information about the Go programming language from Wikipedia. Python overtakes Javascript as the most questioned language on Stack Overflow "Global App Testing, crowdsourced by QA Testing Company, in a new study found that JavaScript has been dethroned by Python as the most asked-about programming language on the Q&A platform of Stack Overflow." Is this a signal?

Leadership

How companies can nurture internal thought leaders Think about the below two questions and consider which one has played out at your organization.

Is your enterprise dominated by passive thinking and prescribed routines? Or is it one that generates fresh thinking and unlocks insights into the future?

Whether you are an IT Manager leading an IBM i Development Team or an IBM i Developer, this article has some good starting points about how to drive change in your company because "thought leadership is about capturing the future". You don't have to be a CEO to be a leader There has never been a greater need for leadership within the ranks of the IBM i community. I think this article makes some interesting points about leadership and where it comes from. It's not always from the top. It often "bubbles up" from within the ranks.

Modernization

Application Services Market Outlook 2023 Application Modernization is "the refactoring, re-purposing or consolidation of legacy software programming to align it more closely with current business needs." The report divides the market up into the following languages: "Cobol, ADA, PL/1, RPG, Assembler and PowerBuilder, Cobol is the largest subdivision with the market share of 63.32% in 2017". Again, this is a clear sign there is a lot of work out there for RPG developers in the IBM i marketplace. Migrating Legacy Web Applications to Laravel The RPG developer community is not the only one that is dealing with legacy applications. Virtually, all development communities can suffer the consequences of legacy applications. As this article focused on PHP points out, if you don't migrate to a modern framework you end up hemorrhaging your

employees/developers, and your code grows more outdated and consequently prove more difficult and costly to upgrade eventually. You’ll be running on frameworks that have passed end-of-life and end-of-support which means security holes will be discovered but remain unpatched and you’ll be forced to run older operating systems to run older versions of PHP for framework compatibility yielding yet more known but unpatched security holes.

Trends

The most hyped technologies since 2000 "When emerging technologies grab the headlines, how can we discern the hype from what is truly commercially viable?" Here is an infographic that puts it all in perspective.

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