• Agilysys Hires JPMorgan for Possible Sale

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a vaguely worded statement released by server reseller and application software provider Agilysys, which has a substantial presence in the i ecosystem, the company indicated that it might be putting itself up for sale. The company, which is based in Boca Raton, Florida, has also deferred its annual meeting until the bankers at JPMorgan Chase finish up doing the financial analysis and laying out a strategy for the company. On June 16, the board of directors at Agilysys released a statement that said they had voted to expand the advisory role of JPMorgan Chase to work with the

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• How Long You Been in The AS/400 Game, and Are You Winning?

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, I reminded you–as if you needed to be reminded–of the AS/400’s impending 20th birthday, which hit on June 21. It has been a long and sometimes wacky journey to get here, and it occurs to me as IBM is celebrating the AS/400’s birthday at the Rochester, Minnesota, lab and factory today on Monday, with Bill Zeitler and some customers flying out to the site, that many of us have long and interesting histories with the AS/400. As I was talking to some ISVs last week, I asked them their stories, which some of them told. Some people, as

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• IBM Releases CPW Ratings on Power 595 for i 6.1 Early

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the 20th birthday celebrations for the AS/400 platform today in IBM‘s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, the company will be announcing the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) performance ratings on the top-end Power6-based Power 595 running the new i 6.1 operating system. While the i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 operating systems are not going to be supported on the Power 595s, which span from eight to 64 cores running at either 4.2 GHz or 5 GHz, until September 9, the company wants customers to start planning their acquisitions now, since the Power 595 iron started shipping on May 6,

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• Looking for AS/400 Work? Check Out This Site

  June 23, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of my word cloud stories based on data ripped out of the major online job sites, I got wind from one intrepid reader of The Four Hundred about a Web site that is expressly dedicated to categorizing and indexing jobs for the AS/400 platform and its progeny. So I thought I would tell you about it, as this reader suggested, just in case you haven’t heard of it. The site, as you might have predicted, is called Get AS400 Jobs, and it is located at www.getas400jobs.com. The site is run by Get It, a company located

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• IBM Says SOA Deployments Will Rise in 2008, But What About SMBs?

  June 23, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A new survey commissioned by IBM indicates that the deployment of service oriented architectures (SOAs) is on the uptake compared to previous years, and remains a top business priority for 2008, despite the tough economy. While large companies are moving forward with their SOA strategies, there is little evidence it is trickling down to the vast majority of IT shops that are small and midsized businesses. Results of IBM’s study, which was conducted by the Link Group, indicate that 50 percent of customers are currently deploying SOAs, while another 27 percent are piloting some sort of SOA project. More than

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• Ex-IBM Exec Takes Over as Bsafe CEO

  June 23, 2008 Dan Burger

  Bsafe Information Systems, a security software company that makes products for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform, announced last week that Avi Cramer is the company’s new chief executive officer. Bsafe’s chairman of the board, Charles Benchabat, praised the selection of Cramer, saying the new CEO will benefit the company with his abilities to “forge strategy and strategic relationships.” Cramer comes to the Israeli-based company from IBM where he was vice president of sales, in charge of large enterprises in Israel. Prior to that, he was CEO and chairman of IBM Global Services Israel and was a member of the

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• Hospital Supplier Installs VAI’s WebSphere-Based Portal

  June 22, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Seneca Medical, a medical surgical supply company in Ohio, has installed VAI‘s S2K Enterprise Portal software to deliver a fully functional requisitioning system over the Web. Seneca Medical is $350 million distributor of medical and dental supplies, office furniture, OTC products, paper products, pharmaceuticals, and sports medicine products. The company serves hospitals and doctor’s and dentist’s offices from warehouses in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The company previously had a Web site where customers could place orders and check on orders, but it was difficult to navigate, and generally left much to be desired, according to the companies.

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• Creating an RPG-based Web Service Using WDSC, Part 1

  June 18, 2008 Shannon O'Donnell

  Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years, you cannot help but to have heard about Web Services. According to the industry experts, whoever they are, Web Services will solve every problem you have ever had and ever will have in your quest to send and receive data from one computer to another over the Web. And while that may be a bit of an overstatement, it is true that Web Services really do make communicating with another computer system on the Web very easy. In this article I am going to show you how

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• SQL May Be Catching Up with DDS

  June 18, 2008 Ted Holt

  As enthusiastic as I am about SQL, I am not ready to abandon the native DB2-for-i interfaces. There are a few things that DDS and native I/O op codes do that SQL doesn’t handle as well. However, in V6R1 IBM has eliminated one of the DDS advantages. A logical file can do three tasks: it can define a record format to be a set of fields, it can define a data set to be a set of records, and it can create an access path over the data. SQL needs two commands. CREATE VIEW handles the first two tasks, and

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• Admin Alert: Redundancy is Good, Redundancy is Good, Re…

  June 18, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  The next time you order a Power i upgrade, pay special attention to the redundant components that are available. As the computing world moves toward more and more redundancy options, many 24×7 i5/OS shops are requiring absolute redundancy in almost everything available. This week, I’ll look at some of the redundancy options available for i5/OS machines and how they can help your shop. Basic Redundancy The math of redundancy is simple. If it costs 10 percent more to install redundant components, for example, how much will that save the company if it keeps a critical system running during a busy

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