The IBM AS/400 is good at a lot of things, including tracking inventory, processing claims, and tallying sales. And now you can add one more accomplishment to the legendary box’s resume: Running Ponzi schemes. In recent weeks, evidence points to the fact that Bernie Madoff used an AS/400 server to help perpetrate his alleged $50 billion fraud. Data contained on the server, recently confiscated by the Justice Department, will likely play a crucial role in helping to unravel the crime of the century.

Fox Business broke the story about Madoff’s use of the AS/400 to run his alleged Ponzi scheme

For a long time now, the major IT players in the world have been pitching the idea of convergence, by which they meant the coming together of computing and telecommunications technology. Now that the BlackBerry and the iPhone are here, this is pretty much a done deal. (I am joking, sort of.) But Big Blue, hot to chase some economic stimulus dollars from Uncle Sam and to get a piece of a different part of the capital budget at companies, has a new kind of convergence in mind.

This time around, IBM’s top brass is pitching the idea of Dynamic

How do you get your hands on some open source customer relationship management software that’s ready to rock ‘n’ roll on the IBM i? Simple: Take a quick Web trip to the Young i Professionals home page, where you’ll find one of the more popular business-oriented, open source applications: SugarCRM. Visitors can log into the application–as a user or an administrator–and spend some hands-on time with an open source Web application running on the i platform.

The SugarCRM package is part of a new class of open source enterprise applications written for the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and

At 7:20 a.m. on February 2, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the Staten Island Zoo to meet Chuck the groundhog. Chuck, formally known as Charles E. Schumer Hogg, according to Bloomberg News, didn’t appreciate Hizonner’s “teasing him with corn-on-the-cob.” The critter bit the mayor’s gloved left index finger hard enough to draw blood. Mr. Bloomberg remained affable, as is his wont, setting an example of good manners for the Federal government, which is going to spend the next few years feeding potential nippers, among them IBM, Google, and Microsoft.

Now, it could well turn

Frank Soltis, recently retired from the iSeries chief scientist job at IBM and widely acknowledged as the father of the AS/400, isn’t the rocking chair type. Anyone who knows him would not have expected Soltis to stay on the porch in his post-IBM days. Last week, he popped up over at Vision Solutions.

The high availability and disaster recovery powerhouse has tapped Soltis to become a member of its technology advisory board, a group of approximately 25 that includes industry experts, customers, business partners, and the Vision Solutions brain trust.

The advisory group is hand-picked by Vision’s vice president

Good, thoughtful comments from readers of The Four Hundred are always welcome. My suggestion a few weeks ago, in an article entitled The X Factor: Head in the Clouds, that someone–meaning you people, certainly not me–should get RPG running out there on cloud infrastructure like Amazon‘s EC2 cloud, got one reader thinking about what the real issue with clouds and open source RPG compilers is: the apps, not the tools to run them.

Check it out.

Timothy:

Why would someone programming for a cloud use RPG?

I would agree that some people are stubborn and their preference for

IT and electronics distributor Arrow Electronics finished up its fourth quarter and year at the end of December, and considering how bad off the economy seems to be around the world, the numbers could have been worse.

Arrow said that sales fell by 7.5 percent to $4.09 billion, and if the acquisition of LOGIX was excluded, sales would have dropped by 12 percent. The company booked $44.4 million in restructuring and integration charges, which ate into operating income and forced the company to report $43.2 million in net earnings, down 62.1 percent. For the full year, Arrow posted $16.8 billion

Like many application software sellers, IBS, the Swedish ERP software maker that sells RPG and Java variants on the i platform and that is working to port its Java-based ERP suite to Microsoft‘s Windows server stack, is struggling in this tough economic environment. But the company is also hanging in there despite the challenging environment.

In the fourth quarter ended in December, IBS reported sales of SEK 612.4 million, a decline of 14 percent from the year-ago period. (That’s Swedish krona, which at current exchange rates trades at 8.6 to the U.S. dollar.) Software license sales fell by

You know that Big Blue is getting serious about something when it creates a formal division to manage it. Last week, IBM announced that it was creating a cloud computing division just as it had also announced that key systems software would soon be available for deployment on Amazon‘s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Technically speaking, Erich Clementi, who is currently IBM’s vice president for strategy and who was formerly a general manager of the Business Systems division (which peddles gear to small and medium businesses) and the System z mainframe business, is now also general manager of Enterprise Initiatives,

Different waves of computing have been fostered as much by economic hard times as they have been by technological gadgetry and buzz. Some technological transitions start out as good ideas, but bad economies turn them from interesting ideas for some future time to products that must be tried out right now in an effort to cut costs or improve the running of the company in some way. So it might be in 2009 with software as a service, or SaaS.

According to a report just released by IDC entitled Economic Crisis Response: Worldwide Software as a Service Forecast Update,