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  • Familiarity Breeds Strategy As COMMON Board Members Take Their Seats

    May 12, 2014 Dan Burger

    The COMMON board of directors was reshuffled last week after the annual election process that concludes at the Annual Meeting. There isn’t exactly a long line of people volunteering for positions on the board and, therefore, the names are familiar to those who consider themselves active in the IBM midrange community.

    The board now consists of Pete Massiello, Randy Dufault, Kevin Mort, Jeff Carey, Justin Porter, Phil McCullough, and Larry Bolhuis. Massiello takes the role of president this year, Mort is executive vice president, Carey is treasurer, and Porter is secretary.

    Dufault becomes the immediate past president, a role that

    …

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  • LANSA’s View Of Mobile Reality

    May 12, 2014 Dan Burger

    Defining the current mobile computing reality is a bit like nailing jelly to a tree. Challenges are being handled though, and IBM midrange shops are accomplishing projects that surprise the disbelievers. There is a mobile computing reality. It may be different than yours, but that doesn’t mean it does not exist or that it can’t become your reality, too.

    “Our biggest challenge is building the awareness of what can be done with an IBM i,” says Steve Gapp. “We’ve done four or five really big mobile projects where the solution requirements are broad and deep. Mobile is far easier for

    …

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  • Mixed Bag For Arrow’s Enterprise Biz In March Quarter

    May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Master reseller Arrow Electronics, like its peer Avnet, is a bellwether for the IT market. And like Avnet, Arrow saw a bit of a slowdown in the first quarter in its Enterprise Computing Solutions business unit.

    In the quarter, Enterprise Computing Solutions had sales of $1.66 billion, up a quarter of a point compared to the year-ago period, but taking out the effect of acquisitions (including Computalinks), organic sales actually fell by 11 percent. “We experienced a pause in our hardware business, but our software and security businesses were on plan and delivered growth,” explained Michael Long, who

    …

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  • Magic Software Still Has The Touch In Q1

    May 12, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Software development tool maker Magic Software Enterprises is riding up the wave of mobile and cloud software development and tools to integrate legacy systems into these new-fangled apps and devices.

    In the first quarter ended in March, Magic Software reported revenues of $40.95 million, up 22.6 percent from the year ago period. Its costs did not rise as fast as sales, and neither did research and development costs and other operational costs, and so the company was able to bring $4.85 million to the bottom line, an increase of 29.4 percent over the same quarter in 2013.

    The company’s cash

    …

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  • What’s New in IBM i 7.2–At a Glance

    May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

    There’s a whole bunch of new stuff in IBM i 7.2, which IBM formally announced last Monday and actually shipped on Friday. Together with the new Power 8 servers and other major software product releases, these are exciting times in the Power Systems and IBM i community. Here you’ll find a quick, 30,000-foot view of last week’s announcements.

    IBM made hundreds, if not thousands, of additions and changes to the core IBM i OS with version 7.2. At a high level, the biggest enhancements include:

    The i means business.

    • Security boost in DB2/400 through addition of row and column access
    …

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  • Halcyon Adds Forecasts to IBM i Job Scheduler

    May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

    Finding quiet time can be a challenge in today’s fast-pace corporate environment, for people and servers. With the version 12 release of Halcyon Software‘s Advanced Job Scheduler, system administrators get a new forecasting feature designed to easily find lulls in the IBM i job schedule in which to run reports or apply updates. The company also used the COMMON conference to unveil features to its new WebSphereMQ offering.

    The new job forecaster gives administrators an extensive view into all the jobs that Advanced Job Scheduler has slated to run. That view extends wide–to encompass jobs across multiple IBM i

    …

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  • Looksoftware Introduces Open Access to COBOL Development

    May 6, 2014 Dan Burger

    Time reveals all secrets. RPG Open Access is a good example. It didn’t take long for COBOL developers to hear about RPG OA and soon they began asking for an Open Access of their own. So this week, looksoftware, one of the early pioneers in RPG OA, is adding Open Access for COBOL to its product line, which has had a singular RPG orientation up to this point. What’s good for RPG is good for COBOL. Makes sense.

    Open Access for COBOL was something IBM talked about as a potential project, says looksoftware product manager Eamon Musallam. “The level

    …

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  • BCD Rides Demand for Scrollable Grids to RPG OA

    May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

    BCD Software yesterday rolled out a new release of Presto–its IBM i application modernization tool–that now supports IBM‘s RPG Open Access technology. Developing a handler for the RPG OA technology enables BCD to support scrollable grids in Presto, which is something that wasn’t feasible before, the company says.

    RPG Open Access was introduced by IBM four years ago to provide a more modern way to consume data from RPG applications. The technology, which is technically known as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, enables developers and software vendors to bypass the 5250 data stream and instead feed data directly from

    …

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  • Mincron Goes GUI and Mobile with LANSA

    May 6, 2014 Dan Burger

    Mincron is an old school IBM ISV with its roots reaching back to the days of the System/38 and green screen applications with RPG lineage. It’s a niche ERP software vendor serving the durable goods wholesale industry. In the beginning, the suite of applications were all green screen all the time. Then came the day when Mincron executives realized the world was moving beyond text-based data presentation.

    “We started in the late ’90s to modernizing apps,” says Greg Neal, the IT director at Mincron. “This is not quite one of those stories about how it took a thousand tries to

    …

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  • CNX Debuts AutoCode Tool at COMMON

    May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

    CNX today unveiled a beta of Nitro AutoCode, a new tool that allows developers to create basic inquiry and file maintenance applications quickly using a simple wizard-driven process. The new offering, which the company introduced at the COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, builds on the recently released Valence 4.0 framework.

    Nitro AutoCode is all about speed. The company claims that, in a matter of seconds, a developer can create a complete Valence application using the graphical drag and drop designer. The completed application can be either a file maintenance/inquiry or the beginning of a more complex app.

    “I’m really excited

    …

    Read more

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