• Reader Feedback on The X Factor: Head in the Clouds

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• Arrow Hit by X64 Downturn, Proprietary Servers Do OK

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• IBS Sales Decline in Q4, Windows ERP Suite Ramps Up

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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

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• IBM Creates a Cloud Computing Division

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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,

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• SaaS to Get a Bump Up from the Down Economy?

  February 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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,

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• Database Server/400, Anyone?

  February 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The dividing line between a server and a disk array not only blurs from time to time. It also sometimes moves around. A system, of course, includes various servers as well as storage arrays, and the lines are less important. The AS/400 and its progeny have always been systems, even though these systems have been injected with lots of foreign technology–various file systems, runtime environments, emulation environments, and programming languages. Even databases. The AS/400 was, first and foremost, a database engine, and one with an integrated set of tools for storing information in and extracting it from that nameless database

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• Who’s the Fool When it Comes to Training?

  February 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  Is it true that the biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool? I asked Susan Gantner and Jon Paris what they thought. Their combination of experiences when presenting IBM System i and RPG programming topics at local user group meetings, for in-house training at businesses around the world, and on the speakers list at nearly all the major technical conferences tops just about everyone in this field. They also play a major role in the System i Developer team that organizes and presents the RPG and DB2 Summit. Creating a learning environment, it seems to

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• Google’s Love Affair with IBM’s Offspring

  February 9, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  Imagine what would happen if Google and IBM wanted to help you build your Web site. Now suppose the Googlers and IBMers created free site development tools that were aggressively open, capable of running on just about any platform, and able to build Webs that could be used by clients as small as a mobile phone or as large as an engineering workstation. Now imagine that all this has been around a few years and you’ve pretty much missed it, or at least not appreciated it. Maybe it’s time to say “Hello, World” to the Google Web Toolkit and Eclipse.

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• As I See It: If I Were Wise Enough, I Might Say. . .

  February 9, 2009 Victor Rozek

  Watching the reawakening of the human spirit, manifesting in the guise of an inauguration, a National Public Radio commentator said it seemed that the new millennium had finally arrived. Truly, there was something Narnian about the event, as if we had parted the coats and walked through the back of the wardrobe emerging in a wholly different world. Solemn and festive, the 1.8 million freezing celebrants enjoyed and endured a day of firsts. It was as if after eight years of walking down a long, dark, dirty alley, they suddenly turned the corner to find themselves on a brightly-lit, tree-lined

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• Web Site Vulnerabilities Continue Unabated, IBM X-Force Says

  February 9, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Hackers last year continued to compromise commercial Web sites using well-known techniques like SQL injection, putting corporate data in danger, but also raising the likelihood that businesses will infect their own customers with Trojan horses and malware. This was the warning issued by security researchers at IBM‘s Internet Security Systems subsidiary, which published its security report for 2008 last week. One of the bright spots: spam decreased slightly following the shut down of a major distributor. In years past, the vast majority of security-related news and attention was related to Web browsers. Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer (IE), with a

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