Talsco Weekly: Data, Node.js and ERP for IBM i

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

News: How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?
Data: What is Data Governance? Best Data Governance Tools & Software 2022.
ERP: ERP Transitions Loom for SAP on IBM i Customers.
eCommerce: Headless Commerce vs. Traditional Commerce.
Node.js: Node.js Frameworks.

News

How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud? Some "are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud." There was a recent announcement by IBM were a collaborative agreement was signed between IBM and AWS. It has raised a number of questions about the future of the IBM Cloud.

Data

What is Data Governance? "Data governance is the process of creating internal data standards, along with policies that control who can access data and how data is used in business operations and analytics applications." MDM solutions are become valuable for any number of reasons. "As organizations continue to create and collect mountains of data, many are quick to discover that they have too much -- maybe much too much -- of a good thing. It's a big challenge to identify all of the data in their systems, decide which users should have access to what data, ensure that the data is used properly and figure out how to derive real business value from those data assets." "MDM is especially critical when a company enters an ERP project."

"MDM is designed to ensure valid, accurate, and consistent data. In an ERP-enabled transformation, MDM is an important business initiative because it eliminates redundant and inconsistent versions of the same data in the organization and across data domain types.

Best Data Governance Tools & Software 2022 Here is a good article that dives into what Data Governance is as well as how it differs from Data Management. Here is a high level view: Data governance: "Involves implementing comprehensive policies and processes that ensure the quality and security of your most sensitive data, while also complying with relevant regulations." Data Governance vs Data Management: "The difference between the two is that a data governance tool takes a holistic, overarching view of the data lifecycle from a business perspective, while data management is more concerned with the tools, services, and repositories used to handle that data."

ERP

ERP Transitions Loom for SAP on IBM i Customers Did you know that there are 1,500 customers that run SAP on the IBM i? And "unless SAP changes its plans, the company will end mainstream support for its business software running on IBM i in five years." With 45,000 customers around the globe, SAP offers a mix of cloud and on-prem software products. Here is how it breaks down for the IBM i:

SAP has IBM i customers using it "as an application server as well as the database (via Db2 for i). It’s a unique setup as far as supported SAP platforms go, but it’s one that has worked well for SAP and IBM since the Power partnership started in the mid-1990s."

The good news is that customers with SAP on the IBM i "still have about five years of new features and enhancements from SAP to look forward to, and can expect to receive maintenance updates until 2030. And these customers may be able to stay on their ERP platform for another year or two after 2030 before regulatory or compliance pressures become so great that they need to adopt a fully supported ERP product." What I find interesting is, it's not just IBM i shops that have this dilemma for Windows, Unix and other systems are in the same boat. This article covers a lot of ground. If you run SAP on IBM i, this is a must read.

eCommerce

Headless Commerce vs. Traditional Commerce "Retailers are overwhelmed by the challenges of this sudden acceleration and are looking for ways to take advantage of the opportunities that the adversity presents." Customers shop on multiple devices, across multiple touchpoints, and they want seamless, personalized, and effortless shopping experiences all the time. This rapid acceleration in digital commerce is bringing an end to traditional commerce. Traditional Commerce: Platforms that restrict organizations to classic web stores only. Headless Commerce: Headless commerce platforms, decouple front-end and back-end systems and then use API's to connect them. What Headless Really Stands For? "Headless commerce is not only about differentiation between the backend and the front-end but also between all the combinations you need for enabling eCommerce on the web. Headless commerce allows different systems to talk to each other via APIs and collaborate via interfaces to exchange information. It also separates the data from the processes. It bridges the information through APIs, allows machines to talk to each other, and transfer data among each other. As this communication among machines or systems happens between the layers, the complexities remain completely hidden from the front-end in headless commerce." There is a shift taking place in the eCommerce industry. A best-of-breed approach seems to be the most logical because it meets the specific business needs of the customer.

Node.js

Node.js Frameworks "Any discussion of web development would be incomplete without including JavaScript. Also, these days, it’s nearly hard to have a discussion about JavaScript without also bringing up the topic of Node.js." This is also true for the IBM i environment. JavaScript and Node.js are starting to become the go-to choice for web application development on the IBM i. Why? "The quick rise of Node.js is due to its ability to bridge the gap between client-side scripting and server-side scripting." With so many frameworks to pick from, here is a quick read on the top Node.js frameworks to consider.

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