• Enterprises to Drive Hosted VoIP Adoption, Study Says

  October 1, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM and its reseller partners in the System i market are putting a lot of energy into pushing Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony as a means of bolstering the product line and making it more relevant in the modern data center. Convergence of computing and telecommunications is happening on a lot of fronts, and this makes a certain amount of sense. But it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that companies will deploy their VoIP internally. As is the case with other kinds of computing, companies may decide to use a hosted model to provide VoIP services to their end

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• 3Com Taken Over by Private Equity Firm Bain Capital

  October 1, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  3Com, which is IBM‘s biggest partner for bringing Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony software to the System i platform, has been acquired by Bain Capital Partners, one of the powerhouses of private equity and venture funding. Bain Capital and its partner on deal, a Chinese networking equipment manufacturing giant named Huawei Technologies, are together ponying up $2.2 billion for 3Com, which represents a 44 percent premium over the value Wall Street had placed on the company before the deal was announced last Friday morning. Bain Capital is apparently taking an 80 percent stake, and Huawei Technologies will

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• Vision Solutions Makes Its Web Site More Resourceful

  October 1, 2007 Dan Burger

  Citing the constant competitive pressure within technology markets and the pressure on IT professionals to research products and develop solutions while working under tight deadlines, Vision Solutions has renovated its corporate Web site and added a blog. Vision has become the dominant supplier of high availability software for the System i platform since being acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Cressey Bravo and then acquiring its chief rivals Lakeview Technology and iTera during the past 12 months. The new company Web site features an expanded collection of online resources for researching high availability and disaster recovery, as well as

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• IDC Says Storage Software Sales Keep Booming

  October 1, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you wonder sometimes why the major disk array makers stay in that cut-throat hardware market, all you need to do is look at the portfolio of expensive and profitable storage software that they sell as part of their arrays or as part of the servers that their arrays store data for. According to recent statistics compiled by IDC, during the second quarter of 2007, storage software sales rose for the 15th consecutive quarter, going up by 10.4 percent to hit $2.8 billion. IBM had the fastest growth in the storage software market in the quarter, rising by 19

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• Software and Services Gauge Business Performance

  October 1, 2007 Dan Burger

  Maybe the “fish story” method of measuring business performance is your preferred cocktail party answer to the question of “How’s business?” In the executive conference room, however, stretching the truth tends to get people in hot water. As an alternative, it might be nice to have confidence in your ability to measure and track business goals and more effectively manage businesses processes. If you believe IT can help achieve better business performance and that better business performance leads to success against your competitors, take a closer look at this package of software and services from IBM. It is called

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• Weird SQL UNION Results

  September 26, 2007 Hey, Ted

  I was intrigued by your article Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too. I decided to try your tip with some of my own data. The resulting data set had an anomaly in it. The system omitted a row of input, yet the total was still correct. Why? –Wyatt It’s my bad, Wyatt, and I should have known better. (Note to self: Leave instructions for my survivors to put those last five words on my tombstone. It seems to accurately describe my life so far! 😉 The problem was that the example used the word UNION, but it should

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• A Snippet Above the Rest

  September 26, 2007 Paul Tuohy

  You all know that a lot of code consists of similar patterns. In my previous article Be Content with Content Assist, I explained how Content Assist could be used to insert a standard piece of code. This is well and good, but it only applies to free form RPG or COBOL. What about fixed form specs or code that need some alteration? Although not specifically designed with RPG or COBOL in mind, RSE contains a Snippets view that allows you to define snippets of code that may be amended as you insert them into your program. The Snippets View

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• Admin Alert: What Vendors Want to Know (and How to Get It)

  September 26, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  When purchasing i5/OS third-party software, vendors may request system control information for the partition their products will be installed in. This information is used to create unique licensing keys that must be installed with the product for piracy prevention. Unfortunately, IBM doesn’t have one screen to find vendor-required system information. To remedy that fault, this week I provide a roadmap for locating common vendor information. What Vendors Want It’s my experience that System i software vendors are generally looking for two or more of the following pieces of system control information in order to create a unique product licensing key.

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• Boise Cascade Gets ‘m-Powered’ with mrc Reporting Tool

  September 25, 2007 Alex Woodie

  The word came down from Boise Cascade’s management in May like a ton of pulp: Develop a sophisticated Web-based reporting system that interfaces with multiple host systems, and do it in three weeks. For the folks on BC’s application development team, that deadline seemed next to impossible to meet. However, despite being short a developer, the group persevered and managed to meet its deadline, with a little help from the mrc development tool, m-Power. Based in Boise, Idaho, Boise Cascade manufacturers a variety of wood products, including plywood, lumber, particleboard, paper, newsprint, and pulp. The company, which employs 10,000 people,

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• Red Oak Simulates World’s Fastest Human Terminal Operator

  September 25, 2007 Dan Burger

  George Cummings, president and CEO of Red Oak Software, describes his company’s Legacy Integrator product, a programmatic integration tool for connecting System i and System z applications with other applications, as a replacement for the world’s fastest human terminal operator. In other words, Legacy Integrator flips through green screens faster than humanly possible. Much faster. “Our software brings the entire application, or pieces of it, down to the desktop,” Cummings says. “It allows the developer to pick the transactions, capture them, and turn them into callable business objects. Our tool doesn’t capture entire applications by dragging and dropping. You

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