• Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! More Services And Global Variables Available For DB2 for i

  April 7, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  To satiate the insatiable among us, IBM continues to provide new ways for DB2 for i SQL developers and database administrators to programmatically interrogate and interact with their operating environment through the use of “services” and global variables. New “Services” Views The IBM DB2 for i Services have been a great boon to developers and administrators because they give access to information about the IBM i OS environment via the simplicity of SQL. For a brief intro to services, see my article Make Your DB2 For i Apps Environment Aware. There are several new “services” available as of IBM

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• A Fastpath To Open A Specific Member In RSE

  April 7, 2015 Susan Gantner

  One of the first tips I ever wrote for Four Hundred Guru was about keyboard shortcuts for RSE. It was written so long ago, I was talking about WDSC. None of the Rational variants of the product name had come to be at that time. It even predates my downloadable cheat sheet for My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE. As you can see if you look at the cheat sheet, I’ve added a lot more favorites since the original article. The shortcuts in those original tips still work with the recent Rational versions of RSE with one exception.

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• IBM i Toolkit for Ruby, iit For Short

  April 7, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  What if I told you that the best developers in the world are available to work on your next project? What if I told you that they will work for free? Well, they are and they will. In the following paragraphs, I tell you why and how. The best developers in the world will help you with your projects, for free, because of the magic of open source. Open source efforts have to rank right up there on the list of abnormalities of the human race. Why? Because so much is given away at high cost (time, which in turn

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• Crazy Idea #483: A Leveraged Buyout Of IBM i

  April 6, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes the crazy ideas come from us, sometimes they come from you. Sometimes we are all pondering the possibilities at the same time and it seems like an idea is almost a meme, spreading like a virus, hopping from brain to brain, or as I sometimes suspect might be possible, vibrating in the cosmic ether for others to reflect on if they can only hear the image. Whatever scenario this one is, a bunch of you have reached out and asked me to write about the possibilities of a leveraged buyout of the IBM i business. And so, here we

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• IBM i ERP Vendor Finds Success With SaaS

  April 6, 2015 Dan Burger

  As a topic of discussion, software pricing is an incendiary device. But a flame without fuel goes out quickly. And for a lot of companies, status quo means no open flames and don’t even think about throwing that wood on the fire. There’s another term for status quo. It’s called complacency. The opposite of complacency is not change; it’s investigate. In terms of software, that means taking a look at software as a service. Software licensing, support, and maintenance costs can be pretty steep, particularly the up-front licensing charges, which are often a point of fixation for customers. There’s a

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• Winning PHP App Pops IBM i Precepts

  April 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i is often portrayed as out-of-date platform for running ancient applications long since placed into maintenance mode. If you want real innovation, the mainstream thinking goes, you’d best look to more “modern” platforms. But if the award that two European companies recently won for a PHP-based logistics application is any indication, that preconception deserves to be popped, posthaste. In late March, Proximity and Scandinavian House took home the SHD Logistics Award 2015 in the Innovation Technology category. The award was granted for STREAM, the PHP-based application that Proximity developed to provide order, delivery, and transportation management capabilities. Scandinavian House,

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• As I See It: Playing In The Minefield

  April 6, 2015 Victor Rozek

  With some reluctance, I take a deep breath and begin to tiptoe into the minefield. There are topics so polarizing that no matter what opinions you express, or how benignly you express them, they are bound to spawn potent disagreement. And with the advent of social media, taking a stand on anything even slightly controversial guarantees that remote hatred will roll in with tidal inevitability. Topics like discrimination, white privilege, women, minorities, economic equity, and male domination, potentially explosive in their own right, are made incendiary when they are flogged in the pursuit of money. Which is why Ellen Pao’s

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• Agilysys Adds Mobile Manager For IBM i LMS Customers

  April 6, 2015 Dan Burger

  Agilysys develops one of the most industry dominate applications in the IBM i ISV territory. Its Lodging Management System (LMS) has been the standard of the gaming industry for as long as those businesses have been computerized. Casino resort operations around the world use LMS for much of their business operations. A new software release from a dominate software company is a bellwether event for IBM midrange market watchers. LMS 7.3, the first major release since 7.2 in October 2012, is highlighted by the long overdue integration with Insight Mobile Manager, a dashboard application that allows hotel managers to quickly

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• Zend And BCD Get A Little Closer For PHP

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies and BCD have been working together for about three years to help IBM i shops adopt PHP for developing new applications. Under a new partnership agreement unveiled recently, Zend will be referring customers to BCD for custom PHP-on-IBM i development work. But that’s not all the two vendors have up their respective sleeves. After analyzing the existing relationship between Zend and BCD, executives with the companies realized that a regular reseller model was not going to cut it, says Jeff Lovette, vice president of global sales and channels for Quadrant Software, which acquired BCD last year. “What

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• Cilasoft Introduces Single View Of Data From Multiple Systems

  April 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  Data aggregation, for many organizations, is more like data aggravation. Automating data consolidation from multiple files, even those that exist in different systems in different locations, has proved to be problematic, especially for businesses that run from multiple sites. When updating and aggregating data becomes a bottleneck, IT managers start searching for answers. Double the frustration when the distribution of data from one file to multiple files is also a factor. Solving those issues was a priority for Cilasoft, a security and compliance software vendor with a long history in the IBM midrange market. Last week, Cilasoft unveiled CENTRAL

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