• Massive $74 Billion Consolidation in the ERP Space

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  That giant sucking sound you have been hearing for the past several years has been identified by the analysts at IDC. No, there is not a black hole in the clouds above Kansas. No, it is not the sound of all of the money in the Western world heading toward China or our jobs heading to India. That sound is the massive consolidation that has swept the enterprise application space in the past two years. By IDC’s count, from January 2004 through December 2006, a stunning 550 mergers and acquisitions in the ERP and related applications software arena, and

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• Lawson Sees Red Ink In Fiscal Third Quarter

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Lawson Software reported its financial results for its fiscal 2007 third quarter, and the numbers show that it is still digesting its acquisition of Swedish ERP competitor Intentia International. Lawson said that it booked $191.2 million in sales in the third quarter, which ended February 28, with $26.4 million coming from software license fees, $73.3 million coming from maintenance fees, and $91.5 million from consulting and implementation services. Overall, Lawson’s sales in the quarter rose by 118 percent, and the company said that most of that growth was attributed to adding Intentia’s revenue stream to its own. The

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• Vendors Propose Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Standard

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t recall who said it first, but I know it wasn’t me as much as I know it to be absolutely true: Any protocol that comes up against Ethernet eventually loses. It was probably Bob Metcalf, the creator of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. Fibre Channel is feeling the burn indirectly from iSCSI, and rather than take on Ethernet directly, its proponents have now come up with a truce: Run Fibre Channel protocols over Ethernet. Ethernet, which was conceived back in 1973 by Metcalf, is an amazingly resilient technology. Token Ring, IBM‘s network topology and electronics

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• New 36 GB, 4mm Tape Drive Fills In the VXA Gap for i5 Servers

  April 16, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In February, after trying to sell 8mm VXA tape drives for a while on the System i5 server line, IBM killed off the product. The move came in the wake of Tandberg Data‘s acquisition of Exabyte, the former being the supplier of quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tape drives to Big Blue after it got out of that business years ago and the latter being the once high-flying innovator that brought Sony‘s 8mm video tape technology to the data center. By killing off the VXA tape product, which is a low-cost, midrange performance product that sits above QIC drives but

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• Virtualization Can Hurt Security, Gartner Says

  April 16, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of companies are adopting virtualization to increase the utilization rates of their servers and save money. But unless these companies take pains to properly secure their virtualized IT environments, it can end up hurting their security posture, reducing their agility, and increasing costs, Gartner warned last week. While there is a lack of uniformity and standards among virtualization technologies, there is one aspect that all virtualization products have in common, according to Gartner: They create a privileged layer that, if compromised, puts all consolidated workloads at risk. With so many eggs in one basket, it’s even more important to

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• Missing In Action: The Full Outer Join

  April 11, 2007 Hey, Ted

  As far as I know, you haven’t covered my situation in Four Hundred Guru. I need to join two physical files using SQL. It’s possible that some records in the first file won’t have matches in the second file. It’s also possible that some records in the second file won’t have matches in the first file. What type of join do I use? –Chris You need a full outer join, Chris, and DB2/400 (or whatever they call it these days) won’t handle it–yet. I expect IBM to add the full outer join any release now. To simulate the full

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• Reader Feedback on One-Man System i Shops

  April 11, 2007 Hey, Bruce

  I read your recent article about using OpsNav to monitor jobs. What caught my eye was your lead line about being a one man shop. I didn’t think there were too many of us left! Anyway I just wanted to bounce some ideas off someone. The first being, how do I decide what kind of RPG modernization product I should be looking at. LANSA, Profound Logic, BCD, CGIDEV2–there are so many out there, what do I choose? (Well, there is also WebSphere, but I have not heard great things about it.) Or should I be looking at

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• Admin Alert: The Process and Pitfalls of Duplicating Libraries

  April 11, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Last fall, I wrote a column discussing the pitfalls of duplicating files to a test library. However copying files and logicals between environments is just the tip of the iceberg. There is an entirely different set of issues involved when you are trying to duplicate an entire library for test purposes. To that end, here’s my procedural checklist for making an (almost) exact copy of any native i5/OS library. Why We Copy There are many reasons for copying i5/OS libraries, but the most common needs are to create or refresh a test environment with production data, to use an

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• Aldon Tackles Parallel Development Problems with LMi 7.5

  April 10, 2007 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to coordinate among teams of i5/OS developers working in parallel. Who has code segments checked out? How will their work be merged? What if there are conflicts? These are some of the issues that Aldon is addressing with the latest release of its i5/OS change management offering, Aldon Lifecycle Manager (System i Edition), or LMi version 7.5, which features a new graphical compare and merge utility, new automated conflict resolution capabilities, and better integration into Aldon’s workflow tool. In many cases, change management products such as Aldon’s LMi are used so programming moves forward in an

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• Ricoh in Deal for AFP/IPDS Emulation

  April 10, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Printer maker Ricoh Americas has extended its OEM partnership with Intermate A/S for technology that benefits customers printing high quality output from IBM System i and z servers. The deal will give Ricoh’s IBM host printing business a boost over the next three years, until Ricoh finally takes over full control of IBM’s Printing Systems Division, which it’s in the middle of buying. Earlier this year, IBM agreed to sell its printing business to the Japanese electronics devices giant Ricoh Company for $725 million. As part of the deal, IBM and Ricoh will jointly operate for three years the InfoPrint

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