With a sharply declining server market this year and relative stagnation expected for the next four years, at least according to forecasts released by IDC and reported on in last week's issue of The Four Hundred, you can bet that midrange resellers are trying to get a bead on what things midrange shops want and, more importantly, need to spend money on. Which is the main reason why the Enterprise Computing Solutions division of master IT distributor Arrow Electronics has just done its second annual mid-market end user survey.

Infor provided more answers to questions on how its new Infor Flex program is going to work. The company confirmed that Flex will trade some of Infor's short-term profits in favor of a better long-term outlook for its business. And while the company is adamant that it's not imposing a "forced march" on customers, a senior company representative confirmed that a goal of Flex is to consolidate its customers--particularly its 15,000 AS/400 customers--onto a fewer number of strategic ERP applications.

The AS/400 customer base needs to hear from IBM. They want to be reassured--not with words, but with deeds--that they are not being left behind. Loyal as they are, these devotees are not immune to feeling disregarded. Maybe not so much among large enterprises, where approximately 20 percent of the users provide IBM with 80 percent of its revenue, but in the SMB space where 80 percent of its customer base dwells, there is a feeling that IBM's investments in the platform are not sufficient.

Thales next month will begin delivery of Thales Encryption Manager for Storage (TEMS), a new appliance-based key management offering designed to lower the barriers to encryption by making it easier for organizations to safeguard their encryption keys. By using key management standards, like the new Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) unveiled earlier this year, TEMS will eliminate the need for organizations to use multiple key management systems for different applications and platforms, the vendor says.

There is a lot we can learn here in the States from Japan's IBM i partner community. A group of over 70 IBM partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) has joined forces there, the world's second largest information technology market, to launch the IBM i Manifest initiative for the Japanese market.

There's a new security company specializing in helping IBM AS/400 shops deal with their security issues, but there's no lack of experience in the services it will provide. Many of you know the name John Earl. After 20-some years in the business, he's one of the AS/400 (iSeries, System i, and IBM i) community's most familiar faces. He's a noted speaker, author, and security expert. And now he's running his own consulting business called iSecurity Experts.

Remember those tests we took as kids that required us to pick the item that did not belong in a sequence: A) bicycle, B) wheel, C) chain, D) handlebars, E) botox. Well, here's one, courtesy of Time magazine. Going forward, the workplace will be: A) more flexible, B) more freelance, C) far less secure, D) run by a generation with new values, E) increasingly controlled by women. In fairness, I should have added F) all of the above, because Time believes all five conclusions to be true. But given these choices, one item on the list doesn't fit. At least I hope it doesn't.

ACOM Solutions last week unveiled a new System i utility that automatically converts i OS spool files to the ASCI format so they can be used more easily in a Windows environment. ACOM sees the new offering, dubbed iBridge, helping to streamline integration activities between System i and Windows systems, particularly for electronic payment activities involving System i applications and its Windows-based EZPayManager software.

It's back. . . . Well, I think it is, anyway. A long-running rebate deal that IBM has offered in one shape or form or another for the past zillion years, and which was withdrawn from the Power Systems catalog in May, is apparently being reintroduced.

ACOM Solutions last week unveiled a new System i utility that automatically converts i OS spool files to the ASCI format so they can be used more easily in a Windows environment. ACOM sees the new offering, dubbed iBridge, helping to streamline integration activities between System i and Windows systems, particularly for electronic payment activities involving System i applications and its Windows-based EZPayManager software.

As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine.

The ability to print a Run SQL Scripts result set and/or save it in Excel spreadsheet format has been on my wish list and that of others for a long time. V6R1 has fulfilled these wishes and by doing so has made Run SQL Scripts more functional and easier to use.

Do you think it's appropriate to use your Blackberry in a toilet stall? Or to send a tweet from your mobile phone while attending a funeral service? Your mother probably never taught you that these specific activities were naughty because they didn't even exist 10 years ago. Unfortunately, common sense apparently hasn't stopped Americans from practicing poor etiquette with their new-fangled smart devices. And according to a new Harris Interactive survey, most of us are tired of it already.

Last December, I shared four ways to avoid problems caused by the use of global data in RPG programs. I mentioned that a discussion of i 6.1 (or as I call it, V6R1) data-localization features would have to wait for another data. Well, that day is here.

Talend last week unveiled a new version of its extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool that delivers real time integration of connected systems. The new offering, called Talend Integration Suite RTX, allows customers to feed data from one system to another as the data is changed or originated, eliminating the reliance on batch-based data feeds that are hours or days old, and opening up new revenue sources for customers, Talend says.

It looks like the links that you detailed in the Matryoshka Doll article on nested QOpenSys links probably occur after installing PASE on the iSeries. Check out this IBM document that very briefly discusses recursive /QOpenSys links in the AS/400 IFS. IBM doesn't say why this happens, but at least it points the finger at what causes the problem.