• Recognition Of IBM i Begins With Teamwork

  February 11, 2013 Yvonne Enselman

  Events keep reinforcing my opinion that it is imperative to address team building and communication between IT teams. Recently, I was talking to a friend about his frustration regarding his career as a developer. He has advanced skills and has been successful for more than 30 years on IBM midrange platforms. But he also has the feeling his every misstep will be used by the non-IBM i people in his organization as justification to move away from the platform. For the past 10 years, developers working on all platforms and languages have been hammered about modernizing skills to remain marketable.

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• IBM Puts On A Very Slick Power7+ Web Event

  February 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As an IT journalist, I have to sit through more webcasts, interviews, and presentations than most of you have to sit through meetings. Some people put on a better show than others, and what I can tell you about the Webcast that the Power Systems division put together last Tuesday is by far the slickest thing I have seen in a long time. We’re talking Hollywood production values here, and to be honest, I was a bit surprised. If you didn’t catch the webcast for the February 5 announcements, you can catch the replay here, and it was a

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• Storage, Software, And Services Drive Up Arrow’s Systems Biz In Q4

  February 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Enterprise Computing Solutions group of master distributor Arrow Electronics ended the fourth quarter on a high, with business being brisk enough to almost make up for decline in the component business that is the other engine of Arrow and its main competitor in the distribution racket, Avnet. In the quarter ended in December, overall sales at Arrow fell by just under 1 point to $5.4 billion, and if you look at it in local currencies, sales were actually off 3 percent. So the weakening dollar helped the numbers a bit. Sales at the ECS group rose by 11

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• Jack Henry’s Fiscal Winning Streak Continues

  February 11, 2013 Dan Burger

  Jack Henry & Associates, the banking software and payment processing services provider that is a well-known vendor in the IBM midrange, has tacked on healthy increases in revenue for its fiscal second quarter of 2013. The financial report, released last week, showed a revenue spurt of 9 percent compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2012. Net income was bumped up 5 percent in the same year-to-year comparison. For the first six months of the company’s fiscal 2013, revenue increase maintains that 9 clip and net income increases are on an 11 percent gain. Closely shadowing Jack Henry’s established

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• Wisconsin Tech Conference A Smart Move

  February 11, 2013 Dan Burger

  There is a strong win-win for the attendees of the annual technical conference hosted by the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professionals Association and the companies that send IT staff to the two-day educational conference. You could call it leading IT in leaner times, or leveraging human resources, or better investing in IT as a company asset. There’s a payoff for smart employees and smart companies. WMCPA has chosen a session agenda made up of lectures and labs and keynote addresses that covers topics that the majority of IBM i shops want and need to hear about with a lineup of speakers

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• January Sees North America IT Jobs Explosion

  February 11, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  The folks at Janco Associates have some good news for IT job seekers. According to a new Janco report, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the IT job market exploded with 73,500 new jobs in January. Even with the unemployment rate rising to 7.9 percent in 2013, Janco is seeing the number of new jobs for IT professionals is at levels high enough for IT mid-level manager and developers to say IT is in full recovery mode. According to data Janco extracted from the January jobs report from the BLS, there were 73,500 more IT professionals employed

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• What’s That Name, Again?

  February 6, 2013 Paul Tuohy

  One of the great things about writing articles and tips is that people will drop you a note to ask a question or tell you how much they liked (or disliked) what you wrote. But even better is when someone drops you a line to let you know they have taken what you wrote and extended it. Such was the case with my last tip, What’s That Name?, which described how to go about getting a “record layout” in Run SQL Scripts. I received an email from Lynne Noll, who said she had just written 128 stored procedures, and

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• Don’t Clone That Printer File!

  February 6, 2013 Hey, Ted

  I have a program that uses an externally described printer file to create a report. I need to change the program so that it writes some information to one spooled file and the remaining information to a separate spooled file. I could clone the printer file, but that would mean I’d have to change two files instead of one when I modify the report file in the future. Do I have to clone the printer file? –Mark No, Mark, you can build two or more reports from one printer file definition. Here’s how it’s done. Let’s start with a printer

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• Admin Alert: When Was The Last Time That Library Got Backed Up And More

  February 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  This week, I’ll cover some new information about IBM i library backups, tell you how to specify which TCP/IP servers start whenever TCP/IP is started, and demonstrate a second technique for preventing unauthorized FTP access to your server. Let’s get started. Determining The Last Time A User Library Was Backed Up Checking the last time a user library was backed up is easy. You can check it from the green-screen by running the following Display Library Backup List (DSPBCKUP) command. DSPBCKUPL BCKUPL(*LIB) This command will display a screen that looks something like this. (Click graphic to enlarge.) This

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• Liaison Widens Partner Role in Selling Cloud Integration

  February 6, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Liaison Technologies this week launched an initiative to attract more partners to sell its cloud integration products and services. The company already has a successful business selling integration services through its cloud, thanks to the acquisition last year of HubSpan. Now, the idea is to grow the cloud service brokerage (CSB) business in any way possible, including letting partners sell it as a product, or even as their own white labeled services offering. Even before buying HubSpan and its sophisticated CSB offering last year, Liaison had many irons in the integration fire. Its pre-HubSpan repertoire included Electronic Commerce Server (ECS),

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