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OS/400 Edition
Volume 12, Number 48 -- December 1, 2003

But Wait, There's More

If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.

According to a study of the high tech job market just completed by the American Electronics Association, the high tech job sector in the United States is expected to lose approximately 234,000 jobs in 2003. While this is a big number, it is a lot less than the 540,000 jobs that were lost in 2002, taking the industry down to 6 million jobs. AEA has just released its annual survey of industry employment, which is called Cyberstates 2003: A State-by-State Overview of the High-Technology Industry this time around. Between 2001 and 2002, the software sector of the high-tech industry lost 145,500 of those 540,000 jobs, the first time in the seven years that AEA has been tracking job levels that the software category lost jobs. High tech manufacturing companies shed 233,000 jobs in 2002, including 76,000 at electronic components suppliers, 47,000 at communications equipment makers, and 41,000 at semiconductor makers. Companies in the communications services and software sector lost another 146,200 jobs, and the engineering and tech services sector lost another 14,800 jobs. Research and development labs and testing labs in the States saw overall employment actually rise by 7,000 people in 2002. The five biggest states for the high tech industry were hit pretty hard in 2002: California lost 123,000 jobs to 995,000; Texas lost 61,000 to 479,000; New York lost 28,000 to 330,000; Florida lost fewer works in 2002, falling to 271,000 but moving up in ranking by total employee count; and Massachusetts fell by 40,000 to 256,000. High tech exports fell by 12 percent in 2002 to $166 billion, representing 24 percent of all U.S. exports. Venture capital investments in high tech dropped by half in 2002 to $13 billion. Here's to hoping for stability in 2004--although the odds do not favor it.
John Quarantello, one of IBM's middleware gurus, will host a citizens chat on "WebSphere Portal Express for iSeries." Now that Portal Express is part of the iSeries with the OS/400 Enterprise Edition bundle for Model 825, 870, and 890 servers, Quaranetello will answer many basic questions about what the new Portal Express support means for the average iSeries shop. Go to the iSeries Nation home page for more information.
American Software, one of the venerable software vendors in the midrange, reported last week that software license revenues for its second fiscal quarter ended October 31 were up 11 percent to $2.9 million. This is a good sign, since most vendors have been struggling with trying to pump up license fees. Sales of services were, however, down 14 percent to $6.1 million in the quarter, and maintenance revenues were down 11 percent, pushing total revenues down 8 percent to $13.5 million. Nonetheless, cost cutting allowed American Software to bring $2.3 million of that, or 10 cents a share, to the bottom line, up from 7 cents a share this time last year. American Software owns an 86 percent stake in supply chain software maker Logility, which actually saw its revenues decline by 4 percent in the quarter to $5.2 million. American Software ended the quarter with $62.9 million in cash and equivalents in the bank. There are worse positions to be in, for sure. A rebound in the manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and retail industries would be a boon for Logility and American Software, to be sure.
i-flex Solutions, a supplier of banking applications that are used by hundreds of the largest financial institutions in the world, has formed a global alliance with IBM to promote the company's FlexCube and Reveleus application suites on the pSeries Unix platform running IBM's WebSphere middleware stack and using its DB2 database. FlexCube is already available on the iSeries, and the companies will continue to promote the program on the OS/400 platform. The companies plan to support FlexCube across the full set of IBM eServer machines, including zSeries mainframes and xSeries Intel-based servers. The companies are going to start the ports to these platforms in the retail banking area and move out from there. Reveleus is a risk analysis and investment portfolio management application. The i-flex applications run on rival Unix platforms from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems and are popular on those Unix platforms, so the choice of the IBM middleware stack and the port to AIX is a significant statement. Exactly how the iSeries will play out in this is any guess, but at least the future "Squadron" Power5 eServer platform will support either OS/400 or AIX applications.
If you are a small or mid-sized business, IBM wants your junk hardware, and it wants to pay you to get rid of it, too. IBM announced last week that it is expanding its Asset Recover Solutions offering to SMB customers, which pays customers a portion of the fair market value for machinery that still has some value, and charges fees for equipment that is economically useless. Computing equipment has lots of heavy metals and other nasty chemicals in it that are a hazard to the environment, and there are rules from the Environmental Protection Agency in the States and so-called green laws in Europe that prohibit throwing computers into the garbage. Moreover, some government agencies (like the Department of Defense) have privacy rules that require that information storage devices have proper disposal methods to remove information stored on the machines. The DoD, for instance, requires that hard disks be written over with dummy data three times to ensure that the original information is not recoverable. The National Safety council estimates that a stunning 315 million computers were slated to be recycled or disposed of between 1997 and 2004. That's a lot of heavy metal and beige plastic. The disposal operation is being handled by IBM Global Financing, which will try to resell any junk that still is viable. You can find out more at www.ibm.com/financing/dispose.
The European Union arguably has been more aggressive about hackers and spam than the government in the United States, and has just established a special division called the European Network and Information Security Agency to warn its citizens about harmful computer viruses and to help them protect themselves from identity theft and other woes that afflict us in the Internet era. The EU hopes to have the new agency up and running sometime in early 2004, according to the EU's information security commissioner, Erkki Liikanen. According to EU stats, 90 percent of businesses in the region and 40 percent of households are linked to the Internet. You can find out more about the new agency at www.ffii.org/proj/enisa/index.en.html.