Timothy Prickett Morgan
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SMB Customers, BI Projects Lift SAP’s First Quarter
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreApplication software bellwether SAP pulled off a pretty decent first quarter despite all the trials and tribulations at the company that lead to the ouster of its chief executive officer, Leo Apotheker in February. For the quarter ended in March, SAP’s sales rose by 5 percent, to €2.51 billion, and net income was nearly doubled, to €387 million.
In the quarter, new software license sales hit €464 million, up 11 percent compared to a pretty awful first quarter in 2009, and support revenues were up by the same amount, to €1.39 billion. Subscription and other revenues relating to SAP’s online
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IBM Boosts Dividend and Share Buybacks, What About i Marketing?
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe crack habit that is buying back its own shares to artificially prop up earnings per share numbers to appease Wall Street continued again last week as IBM‘s board of directors allocated another $8 billion in cash for this purpose. In an effort to get investors to pump up the stock, Big Blue also boosted its quarterly dividend by 10 cents to 65 cents per share.
In the first quarter, IBM blew $4 billion on share buybacks and another $700 million on dividends, so now its quarterly dividend nut will be 18 percent larger, at $826 million, or $3.3
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IBM Delivers Deskside HMC Console for PowerVM Management
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNo matter which bare-metal server virtualization hypervisor you choose, you need to have an out-of-band management console to configure and tweak the hypervisor. This, as OS/400 and i shops are well aware, has been the case since the Power5 machines were launched many years ago, and it is equally true of VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor and its vCenter manager, Citrix Systems‘ Xen Server and its XenCenter console, or Microsoft‘s Hyper-V and its Systems Center with virtualization plug ins. To virtualize one machine (or many) requires a physical machine outside of the loop. Which is a pain, of
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The U.S. Lost Nearly a Quarter Million Tech Jobs in 2009
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAccording to a new report from the TechAmerica Foundation, a think tank based on the U.S. capital dedicated to the high tech industry, that industry shed 245,600 tech jobs last year thanks to the economic meltdown. That was a 4 percent decline in the high-tech workforce, from 6.11 million to 5.85 million employees across all companies physically located in America.
The high-tech manufacturing sector shed the most jobs, cutting 112,600 workers, down 8.1 percent, to 1.28 million employees in total. Engineering and tech services firms shed 59,100 workers, to 1.59 million, a decline of 3.6 percent, while communications services
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Reader Feedback on RPG Open Access Is No Panacea and As I See It: Depriving the Senses
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs you might have expected, IBM‘s decision to open up the RPG compiler and runtime to allow others to create custom data streams to other applications and devices has got a lot of people thinking and even more of them talking.
We told you all about Rational Open Access, RPG Edition two weeks ago, and then BCD Software and LANSA piped up with their opinion on ROA in last week’s issue. There’s been a lot of back and forth at the water cooler, on the newsgroups, and in the press about this, and it won’t subside any
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Power7 Blades: The i/DB2 Combo Versus AIX/Oracle
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMajor Correction: In this story, I made two errors. The biggie is that I thought the price to activate either i 6.1 or i 7.1 per core on the new Power Systems 701 blade server was $2,250 a pop plus $250 per user, as it is on the Power Systems 700 blade, since both are single-socket blades. Nope. The PS701 blade has the same ridiculous price as the two-socket PS702 blade. So my analysis below is for the PS701 is not correct. I also thought, through vaguary on IBM’s Web site, that the AIX licenses for the Power7 blades were
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Better Than a Sharp Stick in the i
May 3, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA business computer, no matter its architecture or applications, is really just a place to have a conversation between a buyer and a seller of a good or a service and the means to record that conversation for posterity. And the tax man. It is amazing to me, some days, that I spend my days as a second or third order derivative of that conversation. I talk about the people who build the platforms that support those transactions, who are themselves once removed from the transactions. It’s all talking about talking about talking. And the funny thing is, all this
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Admin Alert: Diary of a Production System Upgrade, Part 1
April 28, 2010 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast week, my shop replaced an existing production System i 550 machine with an upgraded Power 6 system. Our plan was to switch production processing to our Capacity BackUp (CBU) machine, configure the new machine, and then switch back. This week and next, I’ll review our installation as a mini-case study and discuss what lessons it can provide to other i/OS system administrators.
The Plan
At upgrade time, our System i/Power i configuration consisted of the following components:
- A System i 550 Power 5 machine equipped with 32 Gb of memory, three processors, and two partitions: a production partition and
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Let One Row Represent a Group
April 28, 2010 Ted Holt
… Read moreDear Esteemed and Highly Competent Professional,
From time to time, I need to retrieve one row (record) to represent a group of rows that share similar characteristics. It’s a good technique, one that I’d like to share with the readers of this unpretentious publication.
Assume a table (physical file) of sales order details. Each row represents a line of a customer order. Some customers submit an entire order at the same time, but others prefer to keep one order open with us, adding new lines to the order as needed. Here are the columns (fields) of the sales order detail
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Files in Subprocedures
April 28, 2010 Jon Paris
… Read moreSubprocedures have been with us since V3R2/V3R6 and have had a major impact on the way that we build applications. Or at least they should have done. Sadly, many RPGers remain firmly rooted in the past.
Those of you who do make regular use of subprocedures have undoubtedly found yourself wishing from time to time that you could define files within them rather than having to resort to accessing globally defined files. With the advent of the 6.1 release of the IBM i operating system, your wishes were granted. Files can indeed now be defined within subprocedures.
The sample subprocedure