Balderdash! That’s the general response to a story we ran two weeks ago in this newsletter about Computer Sciences Corp. blaming its earnings miss in part on an RPG programmer shortage. “There is no shortage of RPG programmers,” says one RPG programmer in the Northeast, “but there is a shortage of RPG programmers who will work at 1985 wages.”

CSC said a lack of RPG talent was partly to blame for the company’s $230 million revenue shortfall during in the fourth quarter. “RPG is not a programming language where a lot of people are learning it today, so there is

SAP is now inviting its Power customers to participate in the final beta program to harden the HANA-on-Power code before it’s released to production. IBM Power Systems and IBM i customers are said to be “champing at the bit” about the prospect of using a single in-memory database to power both transactional and analytic applications in a single server.

SAP officially unveiled its plans to get HANA running on Power last June at its Sapphire conference in Orlando. Over the summer, less than 10 joint IBM-SAP customers participated in a tightly controlled “test and evaluation” program that involved the first

United Computer Group built a trustworthy reputation alongside its growing IBM midrange customer base by offering online backup services. It also offered disaster recovery services to organizations that have figured out the limitations of their downtime survival endurance. UCG has made the investments in equipment and staff to deliver service that meets high expectations, and now it’s taking the next step.

Expedient, a company with 11 data centers in seven markets from Chicago eastward, including the northeast regions of the United States, and UCG decided they could use one another’s help, so they formed a partnership.

Expedient provides colocation

In the old days, you could rely on IBM i applications to always send error codes to a predictable place, such as QSYSOPR. But with the proliferation of newer Web-based applications and apps developed in Java, PHP, and other languages, that is no longer the case. HelpSystems is addressing this dilemma with a new release of its Robot/CONSOLE message monitoring software that looks for errors and alerts that IBM i admins may otherwise miss.

While RPG remains by far the most popular language for developing IBM i applications, the number of IBM i apps written in more “modern” languages like

Online file sharing services like Dropbox have been readily adopted by companies in some fields, but security concerns make them a no-no in regulated industries. That’s created a gap that vendors like Linoma Software are looking to fill with so-called on-premise cloud storage solutions, such as the new IBM i-supported GoDrive offering that Linoma unveiled last week.

GoDrive is a new module that Linoma added to GoAnywhere Services 4.0, which the company formally announced yesterday. Linoma says GoDrive is a secure on-premise solution that provides enterprise file sync and sharing (EFSS) services for authorized users. In other words, it provides