• Rumor Du Jour: i5/OS on Other Platforms? Not!

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange press was abuzz a little last week about the prospect of IBM porting the i5/OS operating system to other platforms. While this would be an interesting development, and one that would quite possibly breathe some new life into the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, it turns out, alas, that such talk is not true and is the result of a misunderstanding of some comments made by an IBM executive at a user group meeting. It all started when Elaine Lennox, the vice president of marketing for what has been called the System i division until last Thursday and which

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• IBM Turns In Its Best Second Quarter in Six Years

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT industry bellwether IBM had a tough first quarter in 2007, with its business in the United States slowing down. But in the second quarter, Big Blue’s U.S. unit rebounded as much as IBM said it might earlier this year, while overseas markets continued to grow as the U.S. dollar continued to be weak. The upshot is that IBM has turned in its best second quarter in revenue and profit growth since 2001, when the bloom was just coming off the dot-com rose. In the second quarter, IBM had sales of $23.8 billion, up 8.6 percent, with three of its

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• As I See It: Lawyers, Lies, and Statistics

  July 23, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Here’s a statistic guaranteed to curdle the cream in an IT professional’s coffee. The huge populations of China and India have produced a correspondingly huge crop of offsprings–628 million kids under the age of 15, give or take a village. That’s a lot of young people who will soon (if they haven’t already) enter the global labor market. Americans, on the other hand, have sired some 60 million moppets, who blissfully haunt the nation’s malls, unaware of the approaching competitive tidal wave about to engulf them. That’s a 10 to 1 disadvantage. Not good odds for future job seekers or

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• Shearer Talks About System i Sales, Server Reorganization

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long time since the i5/OS and OS/400 platform has been the bright spot in IBM‘s quarterly financial results. Two decades ago, when we were just starting to exit the System/3X era and beginning the development that would result in the AS/400 era in IBM’s midrange systems, it would have been hard to predict with any certainty just how popular the AS/400 would turn out to be. And it would have been equally hard, only a few years later, to predict how tough the entry and midrange server market has become for the venerable OS/400 platform,

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• IDC Expects Virtualization Services Market to Double by 2011

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the stone age of computing technology, whenever a new technology came to market, customers spent a fortune acquiring it and then vendors eagerly helped customers install it as part of the product’s acquisition cost. In the modern computing era, products are relatively inexpensive and wickedly complex, and customers have to pay a fortune to get a vendor or a third party to help wrangle with the installation and configuration of the products they buy. So it will be, according to IDC, with virtualization products. Generally speaking, virtualization involves taking servers or storage and slicing them up into

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• AMR Research Bullish on ERP Software Market

  July 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Worldwide ERP software sales grew by 14 percent in 2006 to $28.8 billion, according to a recent report from IT analyst firm AMR Research. While 2006 was “spectacular,” according to AMR, the good times should continue to roll for the next five years, with an average annual growth rate of 11 percent, a percentage point more than the group predicted nine months ago. At least once a year, and sometimes more, AMR publishes a report analyzing the past, the present, and the future of the market for ERP and related software, and ranking the top enterprise software vendors by

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• JDA Picks Up Midrange Veteran Ferrere

  July 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  JDA Software, a developer of i5/OS- and Windows-based enterprise software for retailers, has hired midrange veteran Larry Ferrere to be its new senior vice president of product management and chief marketing officer, the company announced recently. Ferrere’s resume includes stints at two well-respected OS/400 ISVs: J.D. Edwards (now part of Oracle) from 1992 to 1997, and Manhattan Associates, where he was CMO and vice president of sales operations, from 2004 through 2006. Along the way, Ferrere worked at several other tech firms, including Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) from 1981 to 1992; Vastera, an ERP software

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• Aldon Opens Office in the Middle East

  July 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A week after announcing its expansion into the Nordic countries through a new partnership, application lifecycle management software vendor Aldon revealed that it has opened a new office in the Middle East to serve the fast-growing IT market in the region. Aldon, which was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners about two months ago, says the Middle East represents “an important and strategic region” for the company, particularly in the banking industry, its strongest segment. Heading up the company’s Middle East efforts is Samir Bekdashi, a technology veteran from the Middle East who has taken the position of regional account manager

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• Bring Back My Qshell Output

  July 18, 2007 Hey, Ted

  I just ran a CL program that has an embedded QShell script. It produced some output to my display and gave me a message that told me to press Enter. I did, and the Qshell output display went away. Now I want to bring that display back and look at the output again. Can I do that? –Len Yes, and it’s easy. So the readers can see what you’re talking about, let’s look at an example. Here’s a CL program that includes a QShell script. pgm dcl &Script *char 1024 dcl &QshStatus *dec 10 value(0) dcl &MsgDta *char 256 dcl

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• Customize the PC5250 Popup Keypad

  July 18, 2007 Hey, Ted

  I just found out that I can change the function of the keys on the Personal Communications Popup Keypad, similar to the way I can map the keyboard. I created a new keypad with six functions on it. Here’s how I did it. From the PC5250 session within iSeries Access (Client Access), pull down the Edit menu, then select Preferences and Popup Keypad. (Editor’s note: In some versions of Personal Communications, use the Assist menu and select Popup Keypad Setup.) Select the User-Defined keypad, rather than the IBM Default, and click on Customize. At this point, you can expand the

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