• Micro Focus Joins with Partners to Modernize Legacy Apps

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Micro Focus, the British provider of software development tools that is probably best known for its COBOL compilers, last week announced that it has formed a consortium of tool providers who want to help migrate and transform legacy applications running on minicomputers and mainframes. Dubbed the Migration and Transformation Consortium, this organization is an amalgam of providers of various programming languages and database management systems running on legacy systems and companies who provide transformation tools to get these applications to the Web. Specifically, it includes 50 companies with expertise in: Legacy mainframe and midrange systems, including ancient gear such

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• Midrange Shops Ponder Using Outsourcing Services More

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The data might be a little thin, but this could be the beginning of a trend. According to Susquehanna Financial Group, a stock brokerage house that tracks the IT outsourcing market, midrange shops are more willing to consider outsourcing than they might have been in the past. Susquehanna Financial did detailed interviews with 25 IT organizations that have at least 1,000 employees and that represented healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, financial services, and telecommunications firms. (Yes, 1,000 or more employees is the high-end of the midrange market, not the core midrange, and yes, this is pretty skinny data.) In any event,

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• IBM Details Superfast Optical Chipset

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The future of computing is, for many reasons, probably going to be optical because of the blazing speed and high bandwidth of optical circuits compared to electronic components. The U.S. Defense Department, which helped fund some advanced research by IBM certainly believes so, and both are pleased about a prototype optical chipset that Big Blue detailed at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim, California, last week. Getting electronic signals off of chips and into networks requires a lot of energy, and it takes considerably more energy to move electrons, the basic unit of electricity, than it does to move

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• Manhattan Associates, IBM Ink Deal to Expand Partnership

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Supply chain software maker Manhattan Associates and IBM have been partners in one form or another for the past 15 years, and last week the two re-upped their partnership and got a little closer together. Under the deal that was announced last week, Manhattan Associates will code its Integrated Planning Solutions and Integrated Logistics Solutions to run atop various operating systems supported by Big Blue and will deploy that software on IBM’s WebSphere middleware stack and using its DB2 databases and other information management software, such as Transformation Extender and Message Broker. These latter two items are data integration tools

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• IBM Takes Over IT Operations as Circuit City Cuts Costs

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Circuit City, the second largest distributor of electronics in the United States, has announced a cost-cutting plan that will see the company fire some 3,400 employees–about 8 percent of its workforce–and outsource its IT operations to IBM. This story doesn’t have a huge OS/400 and i5/OS angle to it, unless you consider that Circuit City is very large user of AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 servers. Like other large enterprises, Circuit City keeps the exact nature of its systems a secret. But we know from past stories that we did here at IT Jungle that as of the summer

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• BOS Shows Improved Financials as 2006 Comes to a Close

  April 2, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Better Online Solutions, the maker of midrange connectivity software and thin clients, is continuing to show improvement in its financial situation after a restructuring last year. BOS said that its sales for the three months ended December 31, 2006, rose by 9 percent to $6.1 million, and gross profits increased by 32 percent to $1.3 million. After divesting several units last year, the company has been able to cut costs, and brought $312,000 to the bottom line. For the full year, BOS posted revenues of $20.9 million, down 13 percent, and a net income of a mere $92,000. However,

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• Two Views on the WDSc Snippets View, Part 1

  March 28, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

  Developers usually don’t like to reinvent the wheel. If we or a co-worker have programmed a task in one source member, it is common to copy that code into another source member when a similar task needs to be done. If you are using WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc), there is another option: the Snippets View. Code snippets can be saved and easily inserted into any source member with a simple double-click of the mouse. A First Look The Snippets View is typically not displayed in the Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) perspective. If you don’t see a tab labeled Snippets,

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• The Case of the Missing Outline (View)

  March 28, 2007 Jon Paris

  One of the most common mistakes made by beginning WDSC users in our on-site classes is to accidentally close the Outline View by clicking on the “X” in the top right hand corner. As those of you who already use WDSC know, Outline view is probably one of the single most valuable features in WDSC, and once you are used to using it, to lose it is a disaster! So how do you get the window back again? There are two ways–the brute force approach and the more “refined” approach. The brute force approach is to simply click on Window

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• Admin Alert: Five Things that Kill Backups (and What to Do About Them)

  March 28, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  For system administrators, there isn’t any worse feeling than reaching for a backup tape only to realize that your backup system has failed and you can’t restore a critical file. While you can’t always prevent backup failures, you can monitor for simple things that will alert you to a disruption. To that end, here’s my top five list of i5 backup issues and what you can do about them. Issue #1: Not changing your backup tapes With many automated backup routines, you simply put in the backup media and the system does the rest by formatting the media and performing

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• IBM and 3Com Unveil New Collaboration Solution for System i

  March 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve been following Microsoft for the last few years, you would have witnessed the software giant executing its unified communication strategy to deliver a next-generation collaboration solution that provides a platform for integrating voice, video, e-mail, and IM, of which the upcoming release of Office Communication Server 2007 is a major part. Not to be outdone, IBM and 3Com yesterday unveiled their own Lotus-based offering, called System i Integrated Collaboration, to challenge Windows supremacy in the emerging market for unified communication systems. The new System i Integrated Collaboration builds on the voice over IP (VoIP) offering, called System i

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