• Avnet Systems Biz Is A Little Soft In Fiscal Q3

  May 6, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first three months of 2013 were choppy for a lot of IT suppliers and distributors, and the situation was no different for master electronics components and IT distributor Avnet. The box pusher saw a bit of a budget flush in the fourth quarter of 2012, which was the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 year, but no such luck this time around with the U.S. government unsure of what it is going to spend once we get put beyond September this year and general skittishness in China and parts of Europe. In the quarter ended March 30, Avnet’s

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• IBM Announces More Share Buybacks, Higher Dividends

  May 6, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  If you’re an IBM shareholder in need of some fast cash, we have some good news for you. IBM announced it has boosted its dividend 12 percent and approved $5 billion in stock buybacks at its annual meeting last week. The dividend of 95 cents a share will be payable on June 10 to shareholders of record on May 10. With the approval of the additional funds, IBM now has $11.2 billion in its repurchase program, which is enough to repurchase about 5.6 percent of its overall share count on Wall Street. Whether or not this is good news for

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• IBM i Skill Building At The OCEAN

  May 6, 2013 Dan Burger

  Each summer, IBM midrange shops in Southern California mark the date on their calendars when the OCEAN User Group Tech Conference will be held. This year it is on Friday, July 19. For some shops, this training and education opportunity is exactly what’s needed: convenient and cost effective. This year there are a total of six educational tracks and 30 sessions that include topics such as: power programming, Web programming, mobile and Web applications, infrastructure, SQL and DB2, IBM i modernization, and new technology. The subject matter experts who are leading these sessions are among the best and brightest in

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• Copy Source Members Between Systems Without FTP

  May 1, 2013 Bob Cozzi

  Moving source code between systems is critical in a multi-system environment. Using save/restore is one way to accomplish this task, but not everyone has save/restore authority. Using FTP is another popular way to move one or more source members between systems, but the downside is that the SRCSEQ and SRCDAT fields are thrown out. Only the SRCDTA field is sent, similar to sending a plain ASCII text file. Maybe I’m late to the party, but I found a better way. The better way is one of those things that causes me to think that I must be the last person

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• Odds and Ends

  May 1, 2013 Ted Holt

  It’s been awhile since we had an issue of odds and ends. Today seems like a good day for it. I hope you find something of benefit here. Hey, Ted: I tried to use the sed command in a CL program to replace [ with [n (newline). I tried many ways to get it to work. I finally gave up and used tr to translate from [ to n. I was really hoping to keep the bracket. When running Qshell commands in a CL procedure, how can you force a continuation line for a sed command? How can you insert

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• Admin Alert: Six Things To Do Before Switching Production Processing To Your CBU

  May 1, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Switching production processing to an IBM i Capacity BackUp (CBU) system involves more than just running the High Availability (HA) software commands that initiate the switch. It also involves preparing your source and target machines to switch places, so that data is correctly replicated and you can confidently run production processing on your CBU. Today, I’ll describe six steps you can take to ensure a smooth CBU switch over. Setting The Stage This article lists out tasks you should consider adding to your HA run book to produce the best results when switching production processing to an IBM i CBU

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• Cloudy And HANA In-Memory Apps Lift SAP In Q1

  April 23, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German software giant SAP is feeling pretty good about its growth in the first quarter selling software and the fact that it was able to push up profits nearly two and a half times faster than revenue growth in the period that ended in March. Specifically, SAP said that in the first quarter, its revenues rose by 7 percent to €3.6 billion, with profits after taxes using generally accepted international accounting standards up 17 percent to €520 million. And that was during a time when SAP added nearly 5,200 employees, to a workforce of 64,598. In the March quarter, SAP

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• IBM Is Working On New Software Licensing Schemes

  April 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The old tier-based licensing scheme worked great for many years, but is rapidly outgrowing its usefulness, thanks to widespread virtualization, cheap CPWs, and cloud workloads. Some software vendors who play by the P-group rules have taken it on the chin, while others have jury-rigged complex rules to make ends meet, and managed service providers (MSPs) just roll their eyes. IBM apparently has taken notice of the problem, and the Power Systems team is working on some kind of fix, IT Jungle has learned. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be news that IBM is working on a new licensing scheme. After all, Big

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• Power Systems Sales Stalled–Again–By Power7+ Rollout

  April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first quarter started out pretty good for IBM, according to the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge. But as it progressed, Big Blue had sales executions with some big mainframe and software deals that pushed out more than $400 million in revenues. And with the Power7+ entry and midrange Power Systems launched in February and not shipping until the end of the quarter, sales of these machines stalled for the second quarter, too. Pushing the Systems and Technology Group to report a substantially larger pre-tax loss than it did in last year’s first quarter. In the March quarter,

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• i Is For Investment

  April 22, 2013 Dan Burger

  Just like any other company, IBM has to make decisions on which technologies to invest in. Of course IBM is in the business of selling technology, although it prefers to be known for selling solutions. As an IBM customer, you buy technology, or you can buy solutions if you prefer. In our IBM i community, where most everything is business oriented, the technology must prove to be useful. It must make business sense, so it’s interesting to take note of what technologies are most worthy of investment. Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and Alison Butterill, IBM i product

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