Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Does Web Query Deal Down Under
April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a year since IBM launched version 2.1 of its Web Query for IBM i follow-on to the ancient Query/400 ad-hoc query tool for the operating system we all love that runs on Power Systems. That 2.1 release split Web Query into Express and Standard Editions and shifted to per-core pricing from a very complex set of priced features you needed a PhD in IBM marketing to understand. (Sorry, I only have a master’s degree.)
Last week, IBM announced a Web Query for IBM i promotion deal for both Australia and New Zealand that gives customers who buy
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Will Big Blue Deep Six Its X86 Server Biz?
April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt was a sea change in the personal computing industry when IBM, which lost billions of dollars in the commercial PC business that its brand helped establish, sold off that business to Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group at the end of 2004 for $1.25 billion. And it might be another sea change for the IT industry, with IBM out on the leading edge again, as it is apparently in discussions with Lenovo to sell off all or part of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo.
I know what you are thinking. IBM is the number three maker
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Power Systems Sales Stalled–Again–By Power7+ Rollout
April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe first quarter started out pretty good for IBM, according to the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge. But as it progressed, Big Blue had sales executions with some big mainframe and software deals that pushed out more than $400 million in revenues. And with the Power7+ entry and midrange Power Systems launched in February and not shipping until the end of the quarter, sales of these machines stalled for the second quarter, too. Pushing the Systems and Technology Group to report a substantially larger pre-tax loss than it did in last year’s first quarter.
In the March quarter,
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How Do I Load This Digital Certificate On My IBM i Machine?
April 17, 2013 Hey, Joe
… Read moreA banking client is requiring us to load a Verisign Class Secure Server CA – G3 certificate authority (CA) certificate on my IBM i box. But when I try to load it into Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), DCM gives me this error: “An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.” What’s going on?
–WC
This is a fairly common problem and it has an easy solution. The certificate won’t load because in addition to loading the bank’s Verisign Class Secure Server CA –
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Extract Zoned And Packed-Decimal Values From Character Fields, Take Two
April 17, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Sometimes a reader of this august publication asks me about a problem that I don’t face, and I reply with an academic answer. But when I face the same problem, my interest ceases to be academic, and I look for a more practical solution. Such is the case with the use of SQL to extract packed- and zoned-decimal fields from a string of character data.
In the January 19, 2005, issue of Four Hundred Guru, I answered a question from Mary, who wanted to create a logical
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Encoding XML (Or HTML) From Within RPG
April 17, 2013 Bob Cozzi
… Read moreRPG developers who jump to the web and CGI programming soon learn that a stream-based syntax requires the use of certain control characters. Unlike native database, which uses structures and hidden attributes to control field size and starting and ending locations, HTML and XML rely on <i>tags</i>, agreed-upon syntax for start and end delimiters. You may be familiar with Comma Separated Values and the use of both the comma and the double-quote as the delimiters for that type of file. XML and HTML use much more verbose values as their tags or delimiters.
Tags do double duty; they separate data
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More Details On That PS702 Blade Deal For MSPs
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLast week, I told you that IBM was giving managed service providers the special utility-priced licenses for IBM i 6.1 and AIX 6.1, similar to the per-core pricing it announced for IBM i 7.1 and AIX 7.1 last October. IBM also mentioned last week that it was adding the PS702 blade server was being added to a discount program for MSPs, but didn’t say what the terms of the deals were.
In announcement letter 313-030. IBM clarified the situation on the minimum amount of dough that MSPs have to blow on PS702 blades and what their discount will be.
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IBM Can’t Be Serious About Selling Used IBM i Systems
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are poking around the IBM website, looking for cheap second-hand equipment to run older releases of the IBM i operating system, you might think you are in some kind of a time warp. But fear not, it is not you. It is Big Blue.
Check out the two machines that IBM Global Financing is selling as refurbished systems:
These are exactly the same two machines offered up in January 2011, with the same i5/OS V5R4 software at exactly the same prices. These System i 520 machines were ridiculously priced back then, and I said so at the
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IBM Revises Another Power Systems Trade-In Deal
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IBM online announcement system likes to play a game of cat and mouse with all of us, and sometimes there is an announcement of a new product or a change in a deal with a certain date on it, but damned if I never saw it when I looked through the announcement summaries, which I do pretty religiously on Tuesday and then double-check again late Friday night as The Four Hundred goes to press.
But, once again, IBM snuck another one by me. In announcement letter 313-022, updating a deal trade-in rebate deal that was last changed in
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IBM To Pump $1 Billion Into Flash Storage
April 15, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue likes to throw its billions around to show that it is an IT big shot, and when IBM uses the “B” word, you know that it is pretty serious about something. Usually it is dividends and share buybacks, but sometimes it is when the company sees an unstoppable force, like the $1 billion investment in Linux in the wake of the dot-com bust, or when it sees it needs to grease the wheels of commerce, as with the $4 billion in financing for partners that the company made available late last year.
The next hot area that IBM