The Four Hundred Archives - Page 376 of 1506

Change Management Plays Major Role In IBM i Modernization

June 15, 2015 Dan Burger

The word is getting around the IBM midrange community that application modernization has not reached mission accomplished status after converting the green-screen interface to a graphical user interface. There’s backend work to be done. And if you don’t have software change management tools, or the SCM you have is only minimally adequate, this is a piece of the modernization puzzle to keep in mind. Recent activity in the SCM market has drawn my attention, so I talked with the folks at Remain Software about what’s up.

There’s a one-word answer to the question about what’s up. The answer is business.

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Reader Feedback On Should We Just Call It Power i Now?

June 15, 2015 Alex Woodie

Last week’s story “Should We Just Call It Power i Now?” generated a mix of responses. While some thought the name Power i was an improvement on the status quo, others were hesitant to endorse yet another name change. Here are the top reader responses, edited for clarity.

IBM has done a really good job of confusing not only current system owners but everybody else as to what the system should be called, apparently even their own business leaders aren’t even sure anymore. Why can’t they just leave it be? Pick something, anything and just leave it for crying out

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OpenPower Partners Open SuperVessel Dev Cloud

June 15, 2015 Dan Burger and Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Tech Open Lab in Beijing, China, is the home to the first open development cloud that IBM is firing up to help developers worldwide gain access to Power8 hybrid systems to create innovative applications. The idea is simple enough: servers ain’t cheap, but without some access to cheap or free iron, developers will stick to the X86 systems they know and can prototype on their laptops.

The development cloud, known as SuperVessel, was created by the IBM Systems Lab and IBM Research arms, which both have facilities in Beijing. (A certain portion of IBM i hardware and software

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HelpSystems Adds SkyView Partners To Its Security Assets

June 8, 2015 Dan Burger

The IBM midrange has undergone a transformation in the past 10 years. Technologically? Yes, but there’s also an evolving process of vendor acquisitions and an increased interest in managed services. Last week we saw another prize claimed by HelpSystems as it purchased the security vendor SkyView Partners. The move signals HelpSystems’ interest in developing security as a service for IBM i shops with little or no time to accomplish security initiatives.

The SkyView acquisition is not the first IBM i security company scooped up by HelpSystems. It acquired both PowerTech and Bytware in 2008, and then Safestone in 2012,

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Enterprise Server Refresh Cycle Gathers Momentum

June 8, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The server refresh cycle is picking up steam, with the market turning in one of the best spurts of growth in the first quarter in many a year and reversing a slight downward trend in server revenues across all vendors and machine types that has been putting pressure on vendors for the past several years since the big bounce after the Great Recession recovery. Some big deals at hyperscale companies, in fact, allowed sales in Q1 2015 to more or less match levels set in the second and third quarters of last year.

According to the IDC quarterly server tracker,

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Managed Service Provider Picks Its Niche

June 8, 2015 Dan Burger

If you’re a traditional IBM midrange shop, the idea of managed services provided by a vendor may seem as unlikely as commuting to work in George Jetson’s flying car. But then how do you explain all the managed service providers lining up to do business in the IBM i community? They are all jockeying for position in anticipation of trend toward outsourcing pieces of IT and in some cases, all of IT. Focal Point Solutions Group is carving out a space of its own.

Here’s a scenario that is not uncommon. An organization is running important applications on the IBM

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As I See It: Listen Up And Ignore Me

June 8, 2015 Victor Rozek

There’s an old chestnut that says you should hire the young while they still know it all. And what a bargain! Insecurity and confusion masked by arrogance and bravado, all at entry level prices. Who could resist? It’s the curse of the human condition that each generation must learn all things afresh. Unfortunately, ignorance coupled with limited experience offer a ready foundation for making poor career choices–decisions that can color a lifetime.

And once mistakes codify into lifestyles, they become very hard to correct. By middle age, bad career choices manifest in resentment and regret. I know of no one

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Should We Just Call It Power i Now?

June 8, 2015 Alex Woodie

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare wrote so eloquently hundreds of years ago. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” Words may be imperfect representations for the things we encounter in real life, but even the Bard realized that words nonetheless carry a certain power and have a certain life of their own. And when it comes to the midrange server platform that we all know and love, what we call it is a discussion all its own.

The platform’s official name, per IBM, is “IBM i on IBM Power Systems.” This name

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Paging Cursors And Position To

June 2, 2015 Paul Tuohy

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

I had a reader email in relation to my article Paging Cursors. The article described a method for paging large lists using embedded SQL in RPG, and the reader was wondering if there was a way to position the list at a certain value. Of course there is!

Please refer to the original article for all of the gruesome details but the basic concept is that you have a subprocedure that returns a “page” of rows from a result set. A page can be any number of

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Beware The Temporary Table

June 2, 2015 Hey, Ted

I am writing in response to your article Dynamic Lists in Static SQL Queries. At a recent NEUSG meeting, Tom McKinley of IBM warned us to avoid temporary tables, especially query chains of temporary tables, as they have no history for the optimizer. I like dynamic SQL. I would have left it alone.

–Lynne

I always enjoy hearing from Lynne because I know I will hear words of wisdom. Lynne raises a good point that I have intended for some time to address in this august publication.

Kent Milligan, one of Tom McKinley’s colleagues at IBM’s DB2 for i

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