http://www.itjungle.com/ System i Articles It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story01.html The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story02.html When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story03.html Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it--or a mix, if they use a mixed model--because these are the people who either cut the checks or approve the cutting. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story04.html This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story05.html Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions is getting ready to report its financial results for the second quarter of 2008, and as is the tradition for public companies, BluePhoenix put out a statement going over preliminary results in conjunction with a big announcement that it was looking to sell its stake in Mainsoft, a maker of .NET and Java tools. The preliminary report was designed to calm down a jittery Wall Street. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story06.html I know, I know. The last thing in the world you want to hear about is the need to learn a new programming language. Or, if you are an IT manager, to pay in terms of time and money to get your programming staff trained on a new language. But this is what IBM is asking customers to do with Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), the heart of Web application development in its recently upgraded set of Rational tools. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story07.html Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM's chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM's birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story08.html The business intelligence software space may not be the T-Rex of enterprise software like ERP systems have been, but it definitely qualifies as Brontosaurus, chewing cud to make a living rather than attacking competitors for the right to live. The BI software market has grown nicely over the past decade, but like other software markets, it has undergone a lot of consolidation and, in recent months, the U.S. market has been problematic. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story09.html The engineers and marketeers at Sun Microsystems worked hard to try to beat IBM to market with a new 1 TB tape drive, and they succeeded in the task last Monday by getting the T10000B tape drive out the door. But IBM was only one day behind Sun, and was so happy to point out that its TS1130 tape drive, also delivering cartridges with 1 TB of capacity, was faster. http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh072108-story10.html CNX has released a new development tool that's aimed at making it easy for RPG developers to create Web 2.0 style interfaces. The new toolset, called Valence, is based on the collection of JavaScript classes called EXTJS, and uses JavaScript's native data-formatting language, JSON. According to CNX executives, Valence delivers a native and extremely fast connections between Web browsers and back-end RPG applications running on the i-based Power Systems server. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story01.html The IBM Power System i users tend to be a volatile mix of old and new. Examples are many, but on this occasion the spotlight is on creating, populating, and manipulating databases. Dating back to the System 38, databases on this platform were created using DDS (data description specification). Outside this universe, other relational database management systems (RDMS) use structured query language (SQL) to define the database. Some System i shops have been converting to SQL, but there have been obstacles. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story02.html IBM recently delivered a new product called Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, or FIM, that acts as an identity and authentication hub for the multitude of platforms and authentication methods used in the field, including WS-Trust, SAML, Kerberos, and RAC-F. What's more, because Tivoli FIM can be called as a Web service, the software is ideal for use in new service oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web 2.0 applications, including those running on i. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story03.html Now that the dust has settled following Micro Focus International's sudden acquisition of NetManage this spring, teams with the two software companies have had a chance to evaluate their respective products and develop a roadmap for how the products will evolve in the midterm. Meanwhile, the acquisition has reshaped the former NetManage company, with some developers getting re-assigned, other workers being let go, and the closing of NetManage's former headquarters in Silicon Valley. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story04.html ARCAD Software, aka 'The Kilt People,' last week announced the opening of a new office in Singapore to serve the growing demand for its software in the Asia Pacific region. The new office is the latest indication of how the French company, which sells application lifecycle management tools (ALM), has been moving to expand the company and its sales. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story05.html Agilysys may be looking to sell its entire company, but that's not stopping it from selling its suite of popular i OS-based hospitality solutions, which are used by much of the Vegas Strip and many of the largest hotels in the world. The latest company to license the collection is Savan Vegas Hotel and Casino, a new 180-room luxury property in Savannakhet, Laos. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story06.html For the folks at Speedy Products, the U.K.-based manufacturer of advanced 'window furnishings technology' (i.e. decorative poles, curtain tracks, tiebacks, and holdbacks), extending their i-based IBS ERP software implementation to their newly acquired Chinese factory and distribution center was as easy as opening a curtain. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story07.html When Bob Vormittag founded VAI (formerly Vormittag and Associates) as a small software development company for the IBM System 3 line in 1978, he didn't envision what it would become. Now, as VAI celebrates its 30th birthday this month, the company took a minute to ponder its past, and consider what the future will bring. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story08.html Relativity Technologies, a developer of tools to allow programmers to gain a better understanding of applications, has teamed up with ILOG, a developer of business rules management systems, to help customers modernize their legacy systems, the two vendors announced last week. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story09.html Interested in learning some new techniques for improving your System i data processing? Curious about how different products can make your job easier? If so then you should check out some of the free Webcasts that System i ISVs are hosting this week, as tracked by our sister publication, Four Hundred Monitor. http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs072208-story10.html We are having more and more users call AS/400 jobs from a SQL Server session on their PCs, and we have trouble giving them the proper library list. Usually, just giving them the libraries in QUSRLIBL works fine. Is there a way to make sure every user, regardless of originating machine or system, gets the library list values of QUSRLIBL? http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg072308-story01.html Let's say I have an IFS file with several thousand lines in it. Let's say I want to print a few lines of that file. My current method is to copy the IFS file to another file, use Edit File (EDTF) with the copy to delete the lines I don't want, and use EDTF's Print command to get the report. Please tell me there's an easier way. http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg072308-story02.html Do you know if we'll be able to read tapes created from a new Linear Tape Open Ultrium drive (400 GB native format) on our old Ultrium LTO 2 drives? We want to take tapes from a scientific vessel at sea that may purchase the LTO 3 drive and read the tapes back in the office on our LTO 2 drive. http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg072308-story03.html