• Worldwide IT Spending to Top $3 Trillion in 2007

  October 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the economy going a bit wobbly in the summer months and with IT often being one of the places where companies immediately cut back on spending, you might be thinking that CEOs and CFOs are sharpening their knives right about now and looking over at the data center. But apparently executives remain optimistic enough about this year and next that Gartner can predict a pretty substantial increase in IT spending worldwide. Gartner last week held its eponymous Symposium/ITexpo in Orlando, Florida, and released a report at the event that said worldwide IT spending will hit $3.1 trillion in 2007,

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• RPG Enhancements for i5/OS V6R1 Revealed

  October 15, 2007 Dan Burger

  Early in 2008, we’ll be seeing another upgrade to the i5/OS operating system, V6R1. IBM previewed some of its features in the upcoming software. Speculation regarding what will be in V6R1 is already at least knee-deep, and you can expect it to get much deeper in the final months of 2007. Those with greatest curiosity are generally the RPG programmers. And for them, IBM has nailed down exactly what a few new features will be. The source of this information is George Farr, IBM’s worldwide product line manager for WebSphere Development Studio, WebSphere Development Studio Client, and the RPG compilers

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• IBM Adds Zend to Value Pak, Ships ESX Server Storage Support

  October 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting this week, IBM will deliver a new Value Pack bundle of software for the i5/OS V5R4 operating system that contains PHP and database software suitable for running PHP applications natively on the System i platform–all installable at the same time and all for a discounted price, including software and support. The Zend and MySQL Value Pack for i5/OS (licensed program product number 5639-MVP) will be available on October 19, and it includes a license to three programs from Zend Technology, the creator of PHP, and one from MySQL, the creator of the popular database engine that is

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• ‘Viral’ Marketing Campaign from Bytware Targets PHP-i5/OS Security

  October 15, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Is i5/OS susceptible to a PHP virus? According to i5/OS security software vendor Bytware, it very well could be. In any event, System i users should be aware of the security threats posed by enabling PHP on the server, the company says, and that’s why it kicked off a “viral” marketing and educational campaign at the COMMON Focus show in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday. Bytware’s campaign, which will play out on the Web over the next several weeks, revolves around a story about a financial services company whose System i server is hacked by a crime syndicate in China. While

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• Avnet Builds Out EMEA Business with ACAL, Magirus Acquisitions

  October 15, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT reseller Avnet said last week that it has acquired two European resellers in an effort to build out its Technology Solutions distribution business. With these deals, the Technology Solutions unit will have sales in excess of $2.5 billion in EMEA, and Avnet will significantly increase its presence in the two largest IT markets in EMEA–the United Kingdom and Germany. On September 27, Avnet paid £41 million (about $84 million at current exchange rates between British pounds and U.S. dollars) to acquire the IT Business Solutions unit of ACAL, a British distributor that wants to sell the solutions business

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• Controlling System i Shutdown Activities Using an Intelligent Power-Handling Program, Part I

  October 10, 2007 Hey Brian

  It happened. We had our system about a year and we had a power crash over the weekend. Yes, we have a UPS, but that does not mean that when the system was starved for power it did not come crashing down, and things got worse after that. When we got the UPS, the boss decided that we would get the version that kept the system up for eight minutes instead of getting the extra battery for 37 minutes. We set the delay timer (QUPSDLYTIM) at two minutes. How is it that we crashed so hard? From this

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• Programmatically Import Excel Worksheets Using IBM’s ActiveX Object Library

  October 10, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Everybody likes to export DB2 data to an Excel spreadsheet. It’s quick and easy, and there are plenty of ways to do it. On the other hand, I’m often asked by people, including fellow developers, to assist them with importing an Excel worksheet into a DB2 table. In fact, what developer hasn’t had the experience of a bean counter asking for assistance in uploading a spreadsheet into an ERP system? Importing native Excel worksheets has always had some measure of difficulty. There are headings to worry about, date

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• Admin Alert: Remotely Accessing an HMC System Console, Part 2

  October 10, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Last week, I began demonstrating a technique to allow a remote 5250 session to attach to and run an i5/OS system console located on a Hardware Management Console (HMC). In part 1, I provided details on configuring the HMC to accept remote 5250 sessions. This week, I’ll examine the PC side and look at configuring an iSeries Access for Windows session to access the system console on the HMC. Ready for Connection As mentioned last week, configuring an HMC to allow remote access to an i5 partition’s system console is a relatively simple affair. It consists of the following

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• looksoftware’s Modernization Suite Resembling a Full IDE

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  For looksoftware‘s customers, modernization of existing applications through the creation of composite programs is usually the goal. Leave it to the IBM‘s and Microsoft‘s of the world to build fully integrated development environments (IDEs) for writing new applications from scratch, the thinking goes. But with the upcoming release of version 9 of look’s modernization suite early next year, developers will find more powerful capabilities typically associated with full-blown IDEs. The task of modernizing legacy enterprise applications is not an easy one. If all it required was replacing green screens with pretty graphical interfaces, it would be a

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• Pat Townsend Normalizes i5/OS Log Data for Security Analyses

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  There are many advantages to using a System i server to run business applications, including high degrees of security, scalability, and reliability. But there are also disadvantages to the proprietary platform, such as the fact that its security log data is incompatible with industry standard formats used by Windows, Unix, and Linux machines, which poses a challenge to security event correlation. Last week, i5/OS software vendor Patrick Townsend & Associates launched a new product, called the Alliance LogAgent, that transforms i5/OS log data into the industry standard “syslog” format. It used to be that nobody paid much attention to the

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