• Software AG Buys Jacada’s Legacy App Modernization Biz

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German database and SOA tool maker Software AG is paying $26 million to take a portfolio of application modernization tools off the hands of Jacada, which has been trying to boost its presence in the System i market for the past decade against some pretty tough competitors. Software AG, which is best known for its Adabas database for IBM mainframes, its Tamino XML database and middleware for SOA-style applications, and its Natural development language for Web applications, has been gradually transforming itself into a contender in SOA development and integration. In April last year, Software AG shelled out $546

  …

  Read more

• Chip Makers Gang Up for Advanced Processes

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Progressively shrinking the circuitry on chips has provided the world with an enormous improvement in computing power every year, but silicon-based circuits seem to be coming up against the limits of physics. That means no single vendor–with the current exception of Intel with its X64 monopoly–can rely on its own financial position to keep investing in ever-more-clever technologies to make faster chips. So most of the major players are ganging up to collaboratively come up with new chip-making processes. In December, Japanese electronics maker Toshiba said that it would join an alliance of chip and electronic equipment suppliers put together

  …

  Read more

• Bsafe and Satyam Partner for System i and z Security

  January 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Israeli System i security software maker Bsafe Solutions is teaming up Indian information technology services company Satyam Computer Services that will see the latter company peddle security services to its growing customer base. Under the deal announced in December, Satyam, which is based in the tech center of Hyderabad, India, and has 45,700 IT staffers doing engineering and application development work, will create a services offering that will deploy Bsafe’s Enterprise Security suite to System i and System z customers who not only want to manage security on these boxes, but on the Windows and Linux servers that are attached

  …

  Read more

• IT Action Heroes Replace Chaos With Calm

  January 7, 2008 Dan Burger

  Not everyone finds their action heroes on the big screen. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme take a seat. You guys are pretty tough when it comes to fiction and fantasy, but could you come up big in a real-life data center where fighting chaos requires a budget and a schedule to save the day? It’s time for the IT Action Heroes to bask in some glory. Meet Iain Williamson, senior IT manager with Scotiabank. He was instrumental in establishing and executing Scotiabank’s change management strategy that brought automation, structure, and repeatability to a geographically distributed team of application developers.

  …

  Read more

• Use SQL User-Defined Functions to Avoid Data Repetition Problems

  December 12, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

  By now, most System i and AS/400 developers know they can enhance the SQL language in DB2 for i5/OS by creating their own user-defined functions (UDFs). In this tip I’d like to focus on one common problem encountered when writing queries and how a simple UDF template can often solve this problem. By way of review, in case you’re not familiar with them, UDFs are pieces of code that can bolt onto SQL. UDFs usually contain business logic for doing complex tasks that would be difficult or cumbersome to do using the SQL built-in functions. There are a variety of

  …

  Read more

• Stuff I Didn’t Publish This Year

  December 12, 2007 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.   My wife and I recently visited our local Cracker Barrel, which is one of our favorite restaurants. While we were waiting for our food, I picked up the peg game that unfailingly occupies patrons at the tables of that establishment and, for the umpteenth time, failed to solve it. The Peg Game In case you’re not familiar with a peg game, here’s how it works. The board has 15 holes arranged in a triangle and 14 of the holes are occupied by pegs. To

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Getting Started with Trial Capacity on Demand, Part 2

  December 12, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  In Part 1 of this article, Getting Started with Trial Capacity on Demand, Part 1, I described how I recently approached the decision to activate additional trial processors on a client’s System i 550 box. This week I’m completing the process by reviewing the activation process steps and the various published and unpublished steps you need to take to add temporary processing power to your system. The Basic Situation Capacity on Demand (CoD) is IBM‘s way of delivering (and selling) additional processors that can be activated in a very short time when your system is experiencing performance issues.

  …

  Read more

• Above Security Takes i5/OS Log Aggregation to Heart

  December 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Above Security, a Canadian provider of security software and managed security services, recently announced that it now supports the System i with its flagship product, CSC2, or Center of Surveillance, Command, and Control. In fact, company officials report they were so impressed with the order and the level of detail in the i5/OS audit journal that they standardized their log collection and aggregation techniques for other platforms on the multi-user business server from IBM. Based near Montreal, Quebec, Above Security has been providing customers with IT security services since it was founded in 1999. In 2002, it launched

  …

  Read more

• Shield’s Remote Journal-Based DR Solution Matures at V2R1

  December 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last month launched a new version of Receiver Apply Program (RAP), a low-cost disaster recovery (DR) solution for i5/OS that is largely based on the remote journaling technology IBM built into the system software of the System i. With RAP V2R1, the company has introduced new features that should make it easier for customers to get back on their feet following a disaster, as well as making the product available to a broader audience. Shield first introduced RAP earlier this year to provide an alternative to i5/OS high availability software, which the company feels is too feature

  …

  Read more

• Pat Townsend and BalaBit Pair Up to Cover System i Logs

  December 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  System i security software developer Patrick Townsend & Associates will resell open system log management software from BalaBit IT Security as part of an expanded partnership announced last week. By pairing BalaBit’s log management software with its own i5/OS product, it will bring a greater degree of coverage of system events for the increasingly open System i server, Pat Townsend says. Earlier this year, Pat Townsend launched Alliance LogAgent, a piece of i5/OS software that translates critical messages that hit the QUADJRN and system operator message queue into the syslog format. By supporting this standard, Pat Townsend was enabling its

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles