• Lawson’s Q4 Profits Slammed by Investment Writeoffs, Sales Up Though

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to hedge your bets in this world is a tricky business, and in the global economy, it is also unfortunately a necessary business, too. But those hedges, as we are all learning once again as we watch the news each day, don’t always pan out. Sometimes they fall flat. And so it has been with some auction-rate securities that application software maker Lawson Software invested in to try to make the most of its money. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 ended May 31, Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Lawson was able to boost its sales by 9.5 percent to just

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• Micro Focus Acquires Liant for COBOL and PL/I Tools

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, from the looks of things, the market for COBOL compilers and related tools to extend COBOL applications to the Web is coming down to three big players–IBM, Micro Focus, and Fujitsu and a few smaller ones–Envyr, Infinite Software, LegacyJ, and Veryant. We’re down to six players because late last week, Micro Focus continued its acquisition binge and bought Liant Software. Liant, which is based in Austin, Texas, is the creator of the RM/COBOL compiler and toolset, which allows mainframe and AS/400 COBOL applications to be ported over to Unix, Windows,

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• IBM Adds New Power Systems to AS/400 and iSeries Removal Program

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a deal that I think has been running since 1988, when the AS/400 was launched. (Well, maybe not that long, but sometimes it feels like it.) To help encourage customers first with vintage AS/400s and then iSeries gear as time rolled by to move to newer machinery, IBM has been offering customers a no-charge service to remove the older gear from your site when you get a new box. Of course, this is not always about altruism. IBM–and its former IBM Credit Corp and current Global Financing unit, which sells refurbished iron as well as features for vintage gear–has

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• IBM Lowers and Then Raises Ultrium Media Prices

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, I think that IT vendors are just trying to drive us all crazy. On July 1, IBM put out an announcement letter (308-800 to be precise) that showed the company had significantly lowered the price of its Ultrium tape media for various tape drives in the TotalStorage family of products. As usual, I went through all the feature codes, explained what they are, and built a table that explains how deep the price cuts were. This is why you keep me around, I suppose. Anyway, that table looks like this: IBM’s July 1 Ultrium Media Price Cuts Machine Feature

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• Agilysys Appoints New Board Member, Selects Special Committee to Weigh Options

  July 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In mid-June, server reseller and application software provider Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the i ecosystem and is a significant driver of Power Systems and Modular Systems sales for IBM, said that it had hired JPMorgan Chase to explore the possible future strategies of the company, including the possibility of selling some or all of the company. Those plans are moving ahead. The Boca Raton, Florida, company that they are all focused on has shifted away from IT distribution and toward supplying IT solutions to end users, hoping to go where the profits are higher. What

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• PHP and the Zend Framework

  July 9, 2008 Erwin Earley

  In a previous series of articles in IT Jungle, I introduced you to the enablement of the PHP language, via Zend Core, on i5/OS and the capabilities that PHP provides for the development and deployment of Web applications integrated with i5/OS objects and DB2 data. (See Related Stories below.) The customer interest in PHP has been high and I receive numerous questions at customer events on its usage of PHP on IBM i. Many people also ask about Zend Framework. What is Zend Framework? Can I use it on i5/OS? How can I integrate the advanced functionality that Zend Framework

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• A Handy SQL Timestamp Function

  July 9, 2008 Hey, Ted

  I have found a great tool for working with timestamp data. I have used it for performance tracking and analyzing data intervals. It’s SQL’s Timestampdiff function, and I think you should tell readers of Four Hundred Guru about it. Timestampdiff returns the difference between two timestamps in the interval of your choice. The first parameter for the timestampdiff function is the interval to use. Valid values for this parameter are:

  In recent articles, I discussed some techniques for preventing your subsystems from restarting after a full system backup; turning off your iSeries, System i, and Power i attention lights; and preparing to add disk drives to your system. After publishing these tips, several readers wrote in with corrections, additions, and stories that flesh out the techniques even further. This week, let’s look at what you had to say and see what additional information we can pick up from them. More On Stopping Your System i From Starting Up After printing a tip on stopping your controlling subsystem from restarting after

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• Vision Solutions Continues HA Evolution with ORION 6.0

  July 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions‘ developers have learned a thing or two over the years following the acquisitions of rivals iTera and Lakeview, and that knowledge is on display with ORION 6.0, the newest release of Vision’s enterprise-strength high availability software for IBM i. Now available, ORION 6.0 introduces a new “one button” role swap feature that promises to simplify role swaps, changes to the graphical and 5250 interfaces, as well as performance enhancements that should benefit SAP ERP users. When Vision Solutions acquired iTera and Lakeview Technology in 2006 and 2007, respectively–or more accurately, when Vision’s parent company Thoma Cressey Equity

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• CCSS Addresses MQSeries Monitoring Pain on i OS

  July 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Monitoring and managing MQSeries running on the IBM i OS (formerly OS/400) server can be a painful experience. Paul Ratchford, a product manager with i OS systems management software specialist CCSS, has yet to see a third-party MQ Series monitoring tool that runs well on IBM i systems. This is why CCSS’ customers requested the company write an MQSeries solution that doesn’t kill the i server’s performance, which the company did and released this month with QSystem Monitor version 12 release 9. MQSeries (officially known as WebSphereMQ since 2002, but still referred to by its original IBM name by

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