• A Big Blue Cloud of Clouds

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced that is brainiacs in research have come up with new cloud storage software that provides a simple way to migrate data across multiple clouds, while keeping it confidential and secure. According to IBM, companies want to move their applications to the cloud but are scared off by poor security and reliability, and the utterly horrifying specter of vendor lock-in. The solution, according to IBM, is its patent-pending “cloud of clouds” approach. In the Big Blue cloud of clouds, organizations can “invoke the resilience of separate clouds to offer stronger protection against service outages and data loss

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• IBM i Options for Open Source E-Commerce

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to powering e-commerce Web sites on the IBM i platform, there are a handful of options that will set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars. For those looking to take the open source route, there is Magento, a PHP-based ecommerce framework that’s owned by EBay. Magento is an open source e-commerce Web application that launched in 2008. Like other open source products that have been successfully commercialized, Magento relies on a core group of developers to develop basic functionality, and taps into a larger network of developers for add-on capabilities. Magento itself doesn’t run

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• Gamma Soft to Feed DB2/400 Data to NuoDB

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Gamma Soft recently announced it has formed a partnership with NewSQL database startup NuoDB to provide data integration capabilities. The partnership will see Gamma’s data integration software serving DB2/400 data, among others, into NuoDB’s database in a real-time manner. NuoDB is one of the more promising startups chasing the sudden interest in, and demand for, so-called “NewSQL” databases that have been built from the ground up to handle huge data volumes and a variety of data types in a way that would cause the schema to break in a traditional SQL database. What makes NuoDB interesting is how its distributed

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• Demystifying AIX Monitoring for IBM i Hacks

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s getting tougher for IBM i professionals to pretend that AIX isn’t there. Every year, it seems, more of IBM‘s system software for Power Systems servers runs either in AIX or PASE, the AIX runtime for IBM i. However, for many IBM i admins, AIX is an enigma that’s wrapped in mystery and shrouded in a riddle. Halcyon Software recently published a best practices guide for AIX monitoring that’s aimed at getting past the Unix gibberish and laying out the issues in plain English that regular IBM i types can understand. The biggest AIX concern of IBM i shops

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• iPad App Integrates with Salesforce.com, IBM i

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The Casey Group last month launched Sales Navigator, a new business application that allows users to access their Salesforce.com data from the comfort of an iPad. Sales Navigator makes it easier for sales forces to access contacts, calendars, and customer location data that’s stored in their Salesforce.com environment running in the cloud. The iPad application is designed to enable sales personnel to access and organize large contact lists, plan daily sales routes, and improve customer relationships. Users can plan their upcoming day with the software, and view leads and contacts on a map. It also allows users to log customer

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• InsightSoftware.com Revs JD Edwards Reporting Tool

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  CFOs and finance managers at JD Edwards shops who need budgeting software may want to take a look at InsightSoftware.com, which yesterday unveiled a new release of InsightUnlimited, its flagship business intelligence software for JD Edwards. Headquartered in Ireland, InsightSoftware.com specializes in developing business intelligence software for Oracle‘s E Business Suite and the World and EntepriseOne editions of JD Edwards. The update unveiled yesterday is focused on the budgeting aspect of InsightUnlimited, one of three components of the suite, which also includes reporting and reconciler components. With this release, users can now define budget details by inserting rows

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• IBM i Installed Base Dominated By Vintage Iron

  December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the IBM i-Power Systems platform was up for an award for longevity, it would actually have to be given two awards. One trophy would be for persevering as the last platform standing from the Minicomputer Revolution back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. And the second medal would be for machines that stay in the field for an incredibly, almost unbelievably, long time. We all know this instinctively and anecdotally, having heard many of the legends of the AS/400 and its progeny out in the field. Stories of machines being sheet-rocked behind a wall or stacked over

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• RPG And Java At The Crossroads

  December 9, 2013 Dan Burger

  The IT director of an IBM i shop somewhere in the Midwest was walking down the street wondering about where he was going to get several programmers with modern RPG skills along with Web and mobile skills. He walks by an employment agency with a sign in the window that says “brains for sale.” So he goes inside. The first thing he sees is another sign that says “CEO brains $8 per pound.” Next to that what he sees . . . . . . is another sign that says, “CFO brains $12 per pound.” Beyond that were signs that

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• The Word Of The Day Is

  December 9, 2013 Dan Burger

  Modern–Spread The Word Have you noticed IBM i executives are everywhere you look these days? I haven’t seen any of them on magazine covers at the grocery store checkout area, but it won’t surprise me when it happens. Steve Will, Alison Butterill, Tim Rowe, Barbara Morris and others seem to be more actively evangelizing. Conferences and local user group meetings are benefiting, many of them are blogging, but where it has picked up even more is their participation in vendor webinars. Last week, I listened in to webinar that co-starred Rowe and Morris and was hosted by looksoftware.

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Pilots Of The Carob Bean

  December 9, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Since biblical times, Mediterranean people have cultivated the carob tree. Its seeds, called carats, are remarkably consistent in mass, about 200 milligrams each. For ages, the carat weight has been a measure of gemstones and other valuable items. The Roman pure gold solidus coin weighed 24 carats; it was the original 24-carat gold. Mobile device displays may soon be described in carats along with pixels and inches. This is because Apple is getting into the sapphire sheet business. It might make a monkey of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, because wherever Apple leads, the rest of the technology world usually

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