Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Lawson Cancels Chat with Wall Street on Fiscal Q3 Numbers
April 4, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe top brass at Lawson Software aren’t in the mood to talk to Wall Street.
The company is weighing a $1.83 billion takeover offer from Infor, and rumors are swirling around that Oracle may take a run at the enterprise application software maker, too. And thus, instead of attending their quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts last Thursday, Lawson’s execs kicked out a PDF of their prepared comments, posted the financial tables, and zipped their lips about everything that is going on.
In the quarter ended February 28, Lawson’s sales rose by 5 percent, to $196 million. Software
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IBM Markets Power Systems-i Through an Email Blast
April 4, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI may not be a formal member of the IBM i choir, but I do stand in the back where there aren’t any pews and sing along in three-part harmony most weeks. Which is why sending me marketing material on the Power Systems and IBM i combination is like preaching to the choir.
That is exactly what IBM did in my email last week, and I must say I am happy about it. Not because I need spam clogging up my email, but because it shows that IBM–not its business partners, but Big Blue itself–is actually doing something about trying
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U.S. Economy Whittles Down Unemployment Rate in March
April 4, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere was good news from the U.S. Department of Labor on Friday, even if it wasn’t great news. According to the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for March, the American economy added 216,000 jobs in March, outpacing the population growth in the country and shaving the unemployment rate by one-tenth of a point to 8.8 percent.
That is a two-year low for the unemployment rate, but nowhere near the 4.5 percent structural unemployment rate that economists agree is as close to full employment that the modern U.S. economy can push down to. By the way, that was
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Oracle to Take a Run at Lawson Software?
April 4, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLarry Ellison has probably never met a software company that he hasn’t at least thought about owning. With a newfound love for systems–servers, storage, networking, and operating systems–in the wake of its $5.6 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year, Oracle, the company that Ellison co-founded and is still chief executive officer of, is looking for a way to expand its software business to pay for its systems aspirations. If the rumor mill has it right, then Oracle is thinking about trying to buy Lawson Software.
As The Four Hundred reported three weeks ago, Lawson came clean
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AS/400 i Mystery Solved–Again?
April 4, 2011 Pat Botz
… Read moreI read with much interest the January 31 article, AS400 i Mystery Solved written by ITJ editor-in-chief Tim Prickett Morgan in response to a question posed by a reader of The Four Hundred. Reader Dan had a very good point and may well be partially right. However, after working with numerous i shops in the last 15 years or so, I have come to a somewhat different conclusion. I believe the biggest problem with the declining use of the AS/400 has been the fact that it was too far ahead of its time! Let me explain.
About 10 years
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Automatically Deleting Spooled Files through Expiration Dates
March 23, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreLast year, I stumbled on a cool method for automatically deleting spooled files. When you create a spooled file, you can set the number of days that you want to keep that file on your system. Then once a night, you can submit a job that runs the Delete Expired Spooled Files (DLTEXPSPLF) command that will automatically delete expired spooled files. You should try it.
–Peter
After working with the Power i and its antecedents for almost 30 years, I always find it interesting when somebody shows me something valuable that I haven’t used before. DLTEXPSPLF is a simple command
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Duplicating an Entire Table or a Subset of a Table Using SQL
March 23, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreIn my previous article Duplicating CPFY Function Using SQL, I presented three questions that are frequently asked regarding SQL that are interrelated:
- Can SQL be used to duplicate the function found in the native CPFY (COPY FILE) command?
- Can SQL be used to duplicate a table similar to the function found in the native CRTDUPOBJ (CREATE DUPLICATE OBJECT) command?
- Can a field reference file be used as the source for column definitions with the CREATE TABLE SQL statement?
I said the answer to all three questions was a qualified YES and introduced the concept of using the INSERT INTO
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Dataram Shrinks Losses in Q3 of Fiscal 2011
March 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreClone server memory maker and storage upstart Dataram has been tightening its belt and moving closer to profitability in its third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended January 31.
In the quarter, Dataram’s overall sales fell by 3.3 percent, to $11.9 million. With research and development, stock compensation, and amortization costs all radically cut back, the company was able to cut losses in the quarter back to $839,000, which was a whole lot better than the $6.54 million loss it had in the year-ago period.
For the nine months of fiscal 2011 ended in January, Dataram’s revenues are up by 10.6
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Avnet Elevates Hamada to CEO Position
March 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMaster IT and electronic components distributor Avnet has promoted an insider to take over the day-to-day running of the company.
Roy Vallee, who is currently Avnet’s chief executive officer and chairman, will step away from the CEO position on July 4, yielding it to long-time Avnet insider Rick Hamada, who is currently the company’s president and chief operating officer. Vallee is sticking around to be executive chairman, and Hamada has been appointed to the Avnet board of directors.
Avnet said that the move was the culmination of a multi-year CEO succession plan. It is not clear if the company considered
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IBM to Ride Growth Waves on Current Iron in 2011
March 21, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI went up to IBM‘s annual Investor Day two weeks ago not only to spend some time with the people who created the Watson question-answer system, whom I have spoken to a number of times on the phone over the past several years, but also in the hopes of getting some insight into IBM’s plans for future x64, Power, and mainframe systems. Big Blue didn’t show too many of its cards, but did reveal a few things about what we can expect from the Software and Systems Group in 2011 and beyond.
First and foremost, Rod Adkins, the senior