Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett Morgan is President of Guild Companies Inc and Editor in Chief of The Four Hundred. He has been keeping a keen eye on the midrange system and server markets for three decades, and was one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, the industry's first subscription-based monthly newsletter devoted exclusively to the IBM AS/400 minicomputer, established in 1989. He is also currently co-editor and founder of The Next Platform, a publication dedicated to systems and facilities used by supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and large enterprises. Previously, Prickett Morgan was editor in chief of EnterpriseTech, and he was also the midrange industry analyst for Midrange Computing (now defunct), and its editor for Monday Morning iSeries Update, a weekly IBM midrange newsletter, and for Wednesday Windows Update, a weekly Windows enterprise server newsletter. Prickett Morgan has also performed in-depth market and technical studies on behalf of computer hardware and software vendors that helped them bring their products to the AS/400 market or move them beyond the IBM midrange into the computer market at large. Prickett Morgan was also the editor of Unigram.X, published by British publisher Datamonitor, which licenses IT Jungle's editorial for that newsletter as well as for its ComputerWire daily news feed and for its Computer Business Review monthly magazine. He is currently Principal Analyst, Server Platforms & Architectures, for Datamonitor's research unit, and he regularly does consulting work on behalf of Datamonitor's AskComputerWire consulting services unit. Prickett Morgan began working for ComputerWire as a stringer for Computergram International in 1989. Prickett Morgan has been a contributing editor to many industry magazines over the years, including BusinessWeek Newsletter for Information Executives, Infoperspectives, Business Strategy International, Computer Systems News, IBM System User, Midrange Computing, and Midrange Technology Showcase, among others. Prickett Morgan studied aerospace engineering, American literature, and technical writing at the Pennsylvania State University and has a BA in English. He is not always as serious as his picture might lead you to believe.
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Coming Soon: Entry And Midrange Power7+ Servers
January 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The long-awaited upgrade to the Power7+ processors for entry and midrange rack and tower servers looks to be on the horizon and moving toward us fast. IBM is gearing up for its next Smarter Computing launch event, which will be on February 5. And the circumstantial evidence and the word on the street both point to a Power Systems launch. This is not exactly a surprise to anyone, of course.
I was able to ferret out plenty of details about the Power7+ processors months ahead of when Big Blue started talking about them at the Hot Chips 24 semiconductor conference
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Stopping Unauthorized Users From FTPing To Your IBM i
January 23, 2013 Hey, Joe
My programmers keep setting up automatic FTP downloads from the network using the wrong user profile. For security reasons, they are only supposed to use a special FTP download user profile, but they keep using their own profiles and I have no way to stop this. How can I lock down FTP so that they can only use an authorized user FTP profile for their client FTP sessions?
–Bob
You can easily use an FTP exit point to prevent unauthorized users from starting an FTP session on your IBM i partition.
An IBM i exit point is a specific point
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Easily Create Help Text For Commands
January 23, 2013 Ted Holt
Extending IBM i by writing one’s own commands is empowering and gratifying, but a command without help text is like scrambled eggs without salsa. Fortunately, generating help text for a command is easy, thanks to a technique I learned from a very talented programmer named Chris Wages. Let me show you how it’s done.
First, you must have a command, of course. Here’s the source code for command DOIT.
CMD PROMPT('Do it') PARM KWD(HOW) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(7) RSTD(*YES) + DFT(*WELL) + VALUES(*WELL *BETTER *BEST) + EXPR(*YES) + PROMPT('How should I do it?') PARM KWD(WHEN) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(8) RSTD(*YES) + DFT(*MORNING) + VALUES(*MORNING
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Dealing With Library Lists In RSE/RDP
January 23, 2013 Susan Gantner
I’m happy to say that I’m hearing from more and more people who are beginning to finally break away from SEU to use Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) in Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP). Perhaps the fact that IBM finally stopped updating SEU for new language features as of V7.1 has caused more shops to consider the move.
I heard from one newbie RSE user the other day with fairly common issue; he wanted to know how to deal with library lists in the RSE environment? In his case, he has a few different library lists due to various packages
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SAP Profits From HANA Appliance, Cloud, And Plain Old Software
January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If Oracle thought it had killed archrival SAP, it looks like the German application software giant was only sleeping.
In the December quarter, SAP booked €1.94 billion in software license fees, up 9 percent, and within this segment, the company’s cloud software business, driven by acquisitions and organic growth, was up a stunning 2,000 per cent to €126 million. Software and related services revenues accounted for €4.23 billion, up 14 percent year-on-year. Total sales came to €5.02 billion, up 12 percent. Operating profits fell by 5 percent to €1.59 billion.
On a full-year basis, SAP’s revenues came in at
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IBM Europe Gives Rebates To Power Resellers Who Push ISV Wares
January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM‘s customers in the United States are being treated to a sweetened trade-in deal if they are buying new Power7 or Power7+ iron and trade-in old Power or non-IBM iron in the process. IBM Europe is taking a slightly different approach in a deal that it announced last week: it will pay Power System resellers an extra rebate it they peddle the boxes with specific software created by third parties.
In announcement letter ZA13-1004, which came out on January 15, IBM says that it will pay “business partner solution providers,” perhaps
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IBM Doubles Up Rebates On Power Systems Trade-In Deal
January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I told you so. It is the new year, and as I said in the opening issue of The Four Hundred, IBM would be doing some wheeling and dealing to move Power Systems machinery ahead of the rollout of the rest of the Power7+ systems in 2013.
So if you are looking to upgrade a vintage AS/400, iSeries, or System i box, their RS/6000, pSeries, or System p equivalents, or any number of non-IBM server iron, listen up. Because IBM has just doubled up the rebates on its long-running, on-again-off-again, Power Systems Trade-In Program.
Actually, if you sift through
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IBM Taps Ingram Micro, Tech Data To Peddle Power Systems, Storage
January 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not every week that the Power Systems platform gets big news that is not related to hardware or systems software that has the potential to shake up the competitive position of the Power business, but last week was one of them. We have been telling you about the Power7+ systems and how IBM is looking to better compete against X86 iron. In November, IBM put $4 billion on the table for partner financing to move more iron. And now, Big Blue is tapping Ingram Micro and Tech Data to broaden its channel sales for Power Systems and enterprise
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The IBM Patent Machine Keeps A-Cranking In 2012
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been so long since IBM was not the company at the top of the list of firm issued utility patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that no one can remember who used to be at the top. With the rankings for 2012, Big Blue has been the undisputed leader since 1992, when it was in the middle of both a recession and an identity crisis and yet kept investing in research and development.
As we explain every year when this story rolls around in January, the USPTO stopped doing official counts and publicizing the number of
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North American IT Budgets Stalled By Economic Issues
January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Like the rest of us, the analysts at Computer Economics want to know what IT shops are planning to do in terms of capital and operational spending this year. And so the company did a survey in the fourth quarter to take the pulse at IT shops around the world, which in North America at least were jittery because of the elections and the looming Fiscal Cliff issues in the United States.
The survey is the basis of the company’s Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2013 report, which was just released. Computer Economics did in-depth surveys of