Top OS/400 Stories from Around the Web

(IT Jungle) Late last week IBM was poised to buy Sun and the conversations had pretty much left the if and were focused on the when. Beyond that, the scuttlebutt turned to the question of whether this titanic IT combo was sailing into the icy waters of antitrust regulations. READ MORE >

(The Register) Just as it seemed that IBM and Sun would pound out a deal, the sound of mighty business jackhammers were replaced by a single tack hammer in the distance. According to The Wall Street Journal, the board of directors at Sun is suffering from a split personality disorder. The personalities at odds with one another are Sun president and chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz and Sun founder and chairman, Scott McNealy. It seems the odds of this IBM/Sun deal being completed have diminished. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) There's a new X64 chip in town and its name is Nehalem. After sizing up its strengths, you can see it has the capability to improve power consumption management, boost performance, and support virtualization at a price point that appeals to small to mid size organizations. What effect will it have on the Power Systems market? Here are a few ideas along those lines. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Both Gartner and Forrester have lowered their expectations relative to IT spending in 2009. And the analyst firms are in agreement that the recession isn't the biggest factor. It's the quagmire that has all but closed the worldwide credit market tap that is the villain. There's still a sunny side, however, as these analysts look for a rebound in 2010. READ MORE >

(Silicon Valley Business Journal) OK, so IT spending is dropping. But the big IT vendors haven't forgotten about the economic stimulus money and the business opportunities it brings. Each would like to see its customers get economically stimulated, and here's what they are doing to help that cause. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Look who's in the clouds. It's IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and plenty of others, including some start-up companies that call the SMB their home. Software as a service and cloud computing looks very promising with industry watchers predicting a rosy future. But the jury is still out on whether interoperability and open standards will be a guarantee. READ MORE >

Vendor Announcements, Promotions, and Deals

(IT Jungle) Post-It Notes are a rather clever invention that had a break-out year in 1980. Now you rarely hear of Post-It Notes because it goes by a more fun-loving name: Sticky Notes. As wildly popular as they are in their original paper format, the digital Sticky Note has also become an office darling. If you are in the content management software business, the opportunity for "Stickies" seems like a no brainer. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Microsoft executives are fond of talking about the number of IBM Lotus customers that are crossing over to the Microsoft side. IBM Lotus counters with similar claims. Who to believe is beside the point. They are both slight of hand artists when it comes to counting customers and users and converts. My advice: Step away from the quote makers and play with the products. LotusLive Engage is a collection of collaboration tools available in the cloud and sold as a service. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) What is it about the word compliance that you don't understand? It's a fairly straight forward, no nonsense kind of term, right? Yeah, but . . . those who wrestle with regulatory compliance mandates like the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard may still be up to their eyeballs in ambiguity. Are you compliant or are you not? Here's how you can be sure. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) For those of you who manage your worries by only dreading one day at a time, here's a way for you to possibly take a day off. It only works in enterprise computing environments where job scheduling involves multiple platforms and applications. But if that's where you're at, your worries can be many. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Hosted high availability and disaster recovery options continue to pop up in the IBM System i market. I'm no genius, but when the number of companies that provide this service increases, it leads me to the conclusion that these providers believe there are companies looking for this solution. Have you ever noticed how the most boats are where the fish are biting? READ MORE >

Redbooks, White Papers, and Other OS/400 Resources

(YiPs) The Young i Professionals are an international group of business-quality techno-geeks interested in the modern capabilities offered on the IBM Power Systems i. One thing you'll find on the YiP Web site is a sandbox where you can test Sugar CRM, one of the most widely used open source business applications. No one checks ID. So even if you are not so young, have some of what these "kids" are drinking. READ MORE >

(looksoftware) Many application modernization projects have goals such as reducing costs and increasing productivity. Compared to replacing a significant number of applications or even an entire ERP system, a popular alternative is to reuse existing code and deliver Web services. This video presentation shows examples and demonstrations of System i applications being reused and extended with smart, thin and mobile user interfaces. Company software is featured. READ MORE >

(Quadrant) Justifying IT projects means demonstrating that the return on investment is both short and sweet. This white paper on paperless process management examines the cost benefits related to reduced use of paper and printers, the workflow efficiencies that result in reduced labor costs, and the savings gained by running a PPM system on existing hardware. READ MORE >

(Coglin Mill) Building a data warehouse, a data mart, or architecting a business intelligence reporting system relies on converting the data being collected, as well as some that's not being collected, and making it into useful data. This white paper discusses data quality issues and provides remedies based on using the company's software. READ MORE >

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

See our full calendar of events at
http://www.itjungle.com/fhm/fhm-calendar.html

April 9 -- Webinar - Ted Holt, editor of the Four Hundred Guru e-mail newsletter, will be presenting an iSociety Fireside Chat titled "30 SQL Tips in 60 Minutes." This session will cover a collection of powerful, effective, and easily implemented SQL tips and techniques that are based on i5/OS, although many of them also apply to other platforms. Holt promises information of use to all levels of users from novice to advanced. This session begins at noon CDT. LEARN MORE >

April 9 -- Webinar - This technical session examines the decision to make existing green-screen applications available as Web applications and whether to Web enable them using refacing technology or to rewrite them as separate Web applications that reuse as much of the RPG code as possible. This session begins at noon EDT. LEARN MORE >

April 14 -- Beaverton, Oregon - A presentation on data management strategies will be the highlight of the regular monthly meeting of the Cascade iSeries User Group. Guest speaker David Alexander will explain how to control costs, improve performance, and mitigate risk on the IBM System i. Topics of discussion include archiving infrequently accessed data when consolidating enterprise applications, reducing hardware and licenses costs, streamlining test data management to speed application delivery, and applying data masking techniques to protect your company from a data breaches. The meeting will be held at the IBM offices, 15300 S.W. Koll Parkway between 1 and 3 p.m. LEARN MORE >

April 14 -- Orlando, Florida - Guest speaker Susan Gantner will be talking about switching from the SEU code editor to Remote Systems Explorer to increase coding productivity at the Central Florida Midrange Users Group meeting. The presentation will cover tips and techniques involving RSE. Gantner is a top RPG expert and a founding member of System i Developer, a consortium of top educators that host the RPG & DB2 Summit events. The CFMUG dinner meeting event begins at 6:15 p.m. at the Orlando campus of DeVry University located at 4000 Millenia Boulevard, Room 110. LEARN MORE >

April 15-17 -- Orlando, Florida - The RPG & DB2 Summit offers education devoted exclusively to the needs of System i developers. Sessions provide practical, use-it-today tips and techniques on current technologies such as SQL, RPG IV, RSE (WDSC or RDi), DB2, ILE, PHP and other Web technologies suitable for RPGers. Expert instructors include Scott Klement, Mike Cain, Kent Milligan and Barbara Morris along with Summit staff members Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, Paul Tuohy and Skip Marchesani. In addition to the three-day Summit, there will be four half-day Headstart Seminars available on Tuesday, April 14. LEARN MORE >

April 16 -- Webinar - This technical session examines instant Web enablement of 5250 screens using BCD Presto. There will be a live product demo that shows how to Web enable an application including menus, subfiles, and window lookups. Also included are how-to instructions for enhancing screens with images, links, and other UI changes. This session begins at 2 p.m. EDT. LEARN MORE >

April 20 -- Webinar - The primary key constraint has some special attributes that go beyond referential integrity in DB2 databases. In this session, Dan Cruikshank, a senior consultant with the IBM Systems and Technology Lab Services Group, will discuss topics such as row filtering using inclusion and exclusion tables, pagination using the PK with ROW_NUMBER, and column sorting for large result sets. Cruikshank has 19 years with IBM and more than 35 years of overall IT experience. His areas of expertise include application and database performance troubleshooting and optimization. He has developed many IBM internal tools for extracting and analyzing system and database performance data. He has written extensively on application performance tuning and database reengineering (DDS to DDL). He is currently one of the IBM Rochester certified instructors for the IBM i Performance Tuning Workshop. This session begins at 11 a.m. CST. LEARN MORE >