Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Debugging Server Jobs In Green Screen
October 3, 2012 Susan Gantner
… Read moreA few years ago, I wrote a tip about my favorite way to debug programs using the Service Entry Point (SEP) feature of WDSC, which I have now replaced with RDP Rational Developer for Power Systems. If you’re a WDSC or RDP user and have somehow missed out on using SEPs for debugging, take a look at my tip.
If you don’t use WDSC or RDP, you probably didn’t pay any attention to that tip. As it turns out, SEPs aren’t just for the graphical toolset. You can use SEPs with the traditional STRDBG “green screen” debugger as well.
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Some Things To Ponder On The Impending Power7+ Era
October 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, the Power7+ era of IBM‘s Power Systems family of servers and now its Pure Systems modular systems is nearly upon us. Or at least the beginning of the era is. It has been a long time since IBM refreshed an entire lineup of Power-based commercial systems from top to bottom, all in one fell swoop, and there is every reason to believe that IBM will have a staggered approach to the Power7+ rollout this time around, too.
In fact, I wracked my brains, and I cannot think of when IBM last did such a rollout. Certainly not since
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Android or iOS: Which Mobile OS Fits Best with IBM i?
October 2, 2012 Joe Pluta and Shannon O'Donnell
… Read moreThe Web may be on every desktop, but smartphones are in everyone’s pockets, from truck drivers to forklift operators. If you’re not already developing Web and mobile applications, chances are you will soon. Joe Pluta (Pluta Brothers Design) and Shannon O’Donnell (IBM i App Store) take you through the benefits of developing applications from IBM i on either the Android and iOS platforms. (Editor’s note: Joe and Shannon, by the way, are speaking on Android and iOS development, respectively, at the upcoming IBM i DevCon conference.)
Android and (IBM) i: A Match Made in Development Heaven
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IBM Gives A Deal To Online Software Buyers
October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSending people around to make the sales pitch and then take orders for product sales is expensive and inefficient even if it is more personable, and IBM wants you to try something new and buy software online.
In a deal running on IBM’s website, Big Blue is opening up its online software catalog in the United States and Canada and sweetening the deal a bit if customers buy online. IBM is not offering discounts on the software, so it is reasonable to expect that big ticket items like operating systems and middleware will be bought this way. But the
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External Disk Array Sales Slow Down A Bit
October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe use of internal disk arrays inside of database, data warehousing, and Hadoop data munching clusters seems to be having an effect on sales of external disk array sales. Maybe.
In the second quarter, according to Gartner, external controller-based disk arrays (meaning they have their own brains instead of relying on controllers under the skins of the servers that the arrays attach to) accounted for $5.5 billion in revenues, up 6.7 percent and marking the eleventh quarter in a row that external disk array sales have gone up. However, Gartner was expecting for 7.9 percent growth and around $62
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Jack Henry Busts Through $1 Billion Barrier In Fiscal 2012
October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBanking software and payment processing service Jack Henry and Associates has pumped up its sales to above $1 billion for the latest fiscal year just ended, the first time the company has hit that sales level and almost assuring that someone–Oracle, Infor, or even Microsoft–is going to try to try to buy the company.
But Jack Henry has done just fine on its own, thank you very much. In the fiscal 2012 year ended on June 30, the software and service provider that specializes in sales to small and regional banks, booked $1.03 billion in sales,
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iBelieve NY: If You Don’t Like Change. . .
October 1, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are trying to get to the future, you can’t always be looking over your shoulder at the past. You have to keep your eyes on the road ahead. And if any message was clear at the iBelieve event hosted by looksoftware last Thursday in my hometown of New York City, it is that we can celebrate our long history but we have to keep moving, keep learning, keep changing, and keep pace with modern technologies like the IBM i platform itself has managed to do. And perhaps with a lot more grace than the humans who program and
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IBM Offers Freebie SmartCloud Slices–Again
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue really, really, really wants you to try out its SmartCloud public cloud, and to try to get you hooked on the idea of IBM managing your infrastructure for you, the company is giving away freebie slices on the SmartCloud in various geographies.
The promotion is running on IBM’s website, and has been spotted in recent weeks in various announcement letters in smaller geographies. And it is the SmartCloud Enterprise variant with 64-bit and 32-bit X86 processors, which have been virtualized and can be set up to run Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Red Hat Enterprise
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Gartner Says Public Clouds Puffing Faster Than Expected
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe public cloud is huffing and puffing itself up and is trying to blow the IT distribution business down. According to a new projection from Gartner, the myriad kinds of public cloudy services available on the market today will account for $109 billion worldwide. That is up 19.6 percent from 2011’s global public cloud revenues, and higher than the 12 percent growth Gartner was forecasting in prior prognostications.
“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” explained Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be
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Oracle Still Struggling With Systems, But Hanging In There
September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t know the meaning of the word regret, and despite the shrinking systems business in the wake of the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.6 billion in January 2010, Ellison and Company are determined to make a real systems business out of this. And to their credit, they are doing a better job than Sun was doing by itself.
In Oracle’s first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in August, the company posted revenues of $8.18 billion, down 2 percent and shy of Wall Street expectations. But thanks to cost controls, Oracle brought just