• Sun Backs Into the SMB Customer Space

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems is known for being a player in the data center, but its servers are not known to be popular among small and medium businesses. And Solaris, like Linux and unlike Windows, is not exactly known as an appropriate platform for SMB shops. But, with a new focus on SMB sales, Sun has committed itself to chase down the SMB customer base to peddle its entry servers, mainly because IT spending in SMB shops is growing a lot faster than spending in the big data centers where Sun is a player. Beep. Beep. Beep.

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• Bain Capital Walks Away from $2.2 Billion Acquisition of 3Com

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The drama in the private equity markets continued last week as credit continues to tighten despite the efforts of the world’s central banks, and in the case of the $2.2 billion proposed acquisition of VOIP wannabe 3Com, one of IBM‘s key partners as it pushes server-based telephony, the drama has taken a political turn as Bain Capital Partners, which said it would buy 3Com last September, said the deal was coming under pressure from Uncle Sam and therefore killed it. In a statement released last Thursday, Bain Capital Partners said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in

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• IBM Raises Prices on Zend PHP Tools, Tweaks DB2 Web Query Charges

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its price change announcements last week, IBM radically increased the prices it charges for various production PHP software for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform from Zend Technologies. The company also tweaked some prices up and down for the new DB2 Web Query database query kicker to Query/400, which IBM created through an OEM partnership with Information Builders, and changed some support prices on its recently acquired DataMirror high availability clustering software. The price changes on the Zend tools will be a bit shocking to customers, particularly small companies who might have been under the impression

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• IBM Acquires Encentuate, Sets Up Security Software Lab

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Big Blue snapped up another small software company to build out its portfolio of products, specifically aimed at improving the single sign-on (SSO) capabilities of its Tivoli security and access control products. The company in question that IBM acquired is called Encentuate, which was founded by Peng Ong in 2001 after he took another company of his, called Interwoven, public. Interwoven is one of the big players in enterprise-grade content management systems, and is traded on the Nasdaq National Market. Before that, Peng was also a co-founder in a company called Electric Classifieds, which launched an

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• BMC Software Shells Out 800 Million Bucks for BladeLogic

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those with the cash can make the big deals now in the IT sector, and intrepid and entrepreneurial companies that might have otherwise been snapped up by competitors backed by private equity firms or just by the firms themselves are now being snapped up by larger IT players. And so it is with BMC Software‘s acquisition of BladeLogic, a maker of IT operations management software. BMC, which is probably best known in the midrange for its Patrol line of systems management tools, is betting pretty big on BladeLogic, which was founded in 2001 in Lexington, Massachusetts. To my

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• System i FACT Site–If You Like It, Tell IBM

  March 24, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a number of years, IBM has been hosting a sub-site on its collection of Web sites called the System i Find And Compare Tool, or FACT for short. If you have been using this tool, IBM put a note up recently saying that any new and additional products added after March 3, 2008, would not be added to this tool. I didn’t even know the thing existed, to be honest with you, and having looked at it last week because someone told me it was not being updated any more, I can tell you that I wish that

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• Grouping a Union

  March 19, 2008 Hey, Ted

  We have several sales history files–one for each year. When I need to combine data for more than one year, I have to use an SQL UNION. I am trying to group “unioned” data and can’t seem to get it right. Is it possible to group a dataset that is built by a union? –Tom This appears to be an easy problem to resolve, but appearances can be deceiving. If you’re not careful, you can get the wrong results when you UNION two or more tables, especially when you’re summarizing data. Divide the query into two steps: one to union

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• Remember the Allocation

  March 19, 2008 Hey, Brian

  Because we run packages, we do not get to use our i5/OS system knowledge very often any more, and thus some things fall through the cracks. For example, I recently had to add a field to a file that we had made accessible to Microsoft Access. This special physical file (ALTINVEN) reflected a one record view of our two-file item master file. We store static info in one item file (ITEMSTAT) and dynamic info in the other file (ITEMDYN). As well-intentioned as this design may have been, both parts change regularly. The production department has some specific uses for the

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• Stopping User from Using the System Request Menu

  March 19, 2008 Hey, Joe

  We have some users who misuse the System Request menu by locking critical records and then transferring to an alternate job. They also sometimes use System Request-2 to cancel their previous requests when they should let those requests run straight through to completion. We’d like to restrict access to the System Request menu just for those users. How can I lock them out? –Bert There have always been some security and processing issues with allowing everyone to access the System i and AS/400 System Request menu. System Request menu access can be abused and some people need to be kept

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• XAware Delivers New Commercial Version of Data Integration Tool

  March 19, 2008 Alex Woodie

  XAware recently announced it is shipping the commercial version of XAware 5, the most recent release of its eponymous graphical open source data integration suite. The company released the open source version of XAware 5 last fall, when it made the open source plunge. Now that the open source community has had its chance to take a whack at it, XAware is announcing the availability of the commercial version of XAware 5. XAware is a Java-based data integration tool suite that allows users to create reusable logic to move data among disparate systems. Instead of writing one-off integration points

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