• IBM Expected to Launch Power6 Servers Today

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it is official. The head honchos at IBM had a big shindig with Wall Street analysts up at its Yorktown Heights research facilities last Thursday, and one of the things that chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, confirmed in that meeting is that the first Power6 servers will be launched today. As expected, the Power6 processors will make their debut in the System p product line, and will feature support for the current AIX 5.3 operating system rather than for the AIX 5.4 operating system that has new software functionality to take full advantage of the Power6 hardware

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• IBM Outlines its Long-Term Financial Goals to Wall Street

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As pointed out elsewhere in this issue, chairman and chief executive officer, Sam Palmisano, and chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, hosted IBM‘s annual Wall Street analyst day event in Yorktown Heights, New York, last Thursday. At that meeting, Big Blue gave an overview of how it saw the next several years unfolding. To get a sense of what IBM said at the meeting, I perused a report put out by Ben Reitzes, who is the lead tech analyst at brokerage house UBS. According to that report, IBM is basically going to take the savings it is getting from

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• Sirius Computer Builds Out Biz With DyComp Acquisition

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In November 2006, IBM system reseller Sirius Computer Solutions announced that it had received an equity investment from Thoma Cressey Equity Partners, which has invested in or acquired a number of i5/OS-related software companies. In the wake of that infusion, Sirius has acquired another reseller named DyComp. “Being a small, regional company has allowed me to hand pick the people on my team and focus on giving the best customer service as an IBM solutions provider,” said Jim Dyson, president and chief executive officer at DyComp, which he founded in 1997 and which is now located in Clemmons,

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• Acquisitions Fuel Growth for Reseller Logicalis

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thanks to a number of acquisitions in recent years, Logicalis, a division of the $3.2 billion tech conglomerate called Datatec, has emerged as one of the dominant value-added resellers of servers from IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Both Logicalis and its parent company just finished their fiscal 2007 years at the end of February, with Logicalis posting very good growth. For fiscal year 2007, Logicalis booked $696 million in revenues, up 37 percent. According to the financial results posted by the company, $43 million of that increase in revenue came from acquisitions made during the prior

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• Big Blue’s Transport Partner Loses Employee Data

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a bit embarrassing for a security-conscious vendor like IBM, but according to a letter that the company sent out to employees last week, data tapes containing information on IBM’s own employees were lost in transport to an archiving facility in late February. According to the letter, which was sent to IT Jungle by an anonymous source and written by Barbara Brickmeier, vice president of human resources at the company, the IBM tapes were lost by accident and were not stolen, and assured employees that while the data included on the tapes included Social Security numbers, it was

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• Developer Population to Grow to Nearly 19 Million by 2010

  May 21, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to estimates made by Evans Data, which watches the segments of the IT space that relate to programmers like a hawk, the worldwide population of programmers is expected to explode to nearly 19 million by the end of the decade. That pool of programmers would be 45 percent larger than in 2006, when just north of 13 million programmers were in the world–with the largest portion in North America, but with a sizable number in Europe and a growing share coming out of the Asia/Pacific area. Right now, 15 countries account for over two-thirds of the programmer population

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• Groovy: A Powerful Scripting Language for Java Developers on System i

  May 16, 2007 Mike Brown

  When programmers are put in a situation to develop and deploy applications for a new environment, they tend to look for familiar tools to use. An example might be a text editor that is similar to something that has been used in the past. Another example might be the command line environment (sometimes referred to as a “shell”) such as Bash in the Unix/Linux world. IBM provides QShell on the System i as a basic command line environment. However, if you are accustomed to the Unix/Linux world, a lot of utilities that you may be used to may be missing.

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• Old Programs Can Learn to Behave Themselves

  May 16, 2007 Ted Holt

  As far as I know, nothing disastrous has ever come of a truncation error in one of my programs. Nevertheless, I’m embarrassed when someone points out that a total figure does not equal the sum of the column of numbers above it. RPG’s EVAL opcode generates a hard error if high-order numeric truncation occurs. We can use the MONITOR opcode to trap EVAL’s truncation errors. But what about all those programs that use antique op codes like ADD, SUB, MULT, and DIV? You can easily make those op codes raise errors upon truncation. Let’s see how it’s done. Here’s an

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• Another Way to Retrieve i5 System Storage Space

  May 16, 2007 Hey, Joe

  You should adjust your focus in your article on retrieving system storage space. The first step in dealing with critical storage errors is not to clear up past problems. The first step is to understand where the space is being used now. The Retrieve Disk Information command and the Print Disk Information command are valuable in finding storage hogs, particularly in the Integrated File System (IFS). Maybe you should explore this possibility, too. –Rob Not being familiar with the Retrieve Disk Information (RTVDSKINF) and Print Disk Information (PRTDSKINF) commands, I decided to run these commands on my system and

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• Look, Ma, 5250 App Access from Outlook, Google

  May 15, 2007 Alex Woodie

  One of the latest trends in business application interface design is less is more. The fewer computer screens your users need to learn and use, the faster they pick it up and the greater their productivity. To that end, many business application vendors, such as Microsoft and SAP, have started enabling access to ERP functions from within Microsoft Office. Now System i application modernization specialist looksoftware is offering similar capabilities with version 8.1 of its modernization suite. Australia-based looksoftware is really starting to push the envelope of 5250 application modernization. Over the past several years, look has assembled a

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