• IT Budgets Down In Europe, Up Slightly Globally In 2012

  November 12, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who live and work in the United States can sometimes forget that other parts of the world are affected by what we do and we are affected by what they do. And so it is that we ponder IT spending in Europe, which is not doing great here in 2012, and for the world at large. Hope springs eternal, and according to the prognosticators at Gartner, IT spending will be on the upswing in 2013 in EMEA and the world over and carry on growing modestly through 2016. “This year is a pessimistic year for IT

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• Managed File Transfers More Than Meets The Eye

  November 12, 2012 Dan Burger

  Managed file transfer (MFT) products are designed to manage, secure, centralize, and automate the transfer of files inside and outside of an organization. In IBM midrange shops running the modern operating system known as IBM i, or its earlier versions known as i5OS or OS/400, there is almost always a reason to share data with other platforms running Windows, Linux, Unix, or Mac OS. System integration and data sharing capabilities are expanding with each tick of the clock. Coincidentally, data security issues are expanding at the same time. With increased risk comes increased regulatory compliance for a lot of companies.

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• Avoiding Mistakes With PHP On IBM i Platforms

  November 12, 2012 Dan Burger

  We all make mistakes. And for those who don’t, I make up for your perfection. There’s value in mistakes. Learning about mistakes is a good way to avoid mistakes. It’s as true with PHP as it is with skydiving. Because a lot of people in the IBM midrange community use PHP, and presumably many more will be learning about it soon, I hope this helps them. This is not to say people using PHP for Web application development are more likely to make mistakes or that it is easier to make mistakes in this environment. Please don’t jump to that

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• Cloud Services Revenue To Reach $43.2 Billion In 2016

  November 12, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  It will come as no shock to IT Jungle readers that cloud computing is no longer a distant trend on the horizon. We have been forecasting the push toward cloud computing for years, and more recently we have been reporting on the growing number of IBM i solution providers that are introducing cloud services. For a platform that is often wrongly accused of being behind the times, the IBM i platform looks to be staying in pace with other similar platforms when it comes to the move to the cloud. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be informed as to where

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• Premise Keeps Tabs on IBM i Cloud with Custom Dashboard

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Premise, a managed service provider (MSP) based in Clearwater, Florida, have built a nifty Web dashboard that tells them all they need to know about the IBM i environments they manage for clients. From ASP usage and MIMIX replication status to rack configs and cache battery status, the dashboard gives Premise engineers and customers instant answers to many of the most commonly asked questions. What’s more, the dashboard may soon be available for any IBM i shop to purchase. Premise is an IBM Premier Business Partner with expertise in hosting IBM i, xSeries, storage, and MIMIX

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• CA Opens 2E Arrays to Outside Web Services

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the 2E development environment released by CA earlier this year makes it easier for organizations to expose 2E business logic to the outside world through Web services. The new Enhanced Array support added to 2E version 8.6 marks a fundamental change in the product, and marks the beginning of a new era in how 2E shops will develop and maintain their IBM i applications in the future. Array programming is well-suited to fourth-generation languages (4GLs) like 2E because it enables lots of individual pieces of data to be updated simultaneously with a single operation. Numerous programming

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• Tableau Attracts Big Attention for Unique Approach to Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  One business intelligence software vendor that has been garnering big headlines lately is Tableau Software. The Seattle, Washington, company says it has come up with a better way for users to not only explore their large data sets, but to display the information in a visually compelling way. The software is being used with data from IBM i servers, but there’s more that could be done to streamline the connection, a Tableau manager says. Tableau started as a research project of Chris Stolte, a graduate student at Stanford University who was researching and studying under professor Pat Hanrahan, who

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• RedPrairie to Buy JDA for $1.9 Billion

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  JDA Software, a publicly held developer of retail management and supply chain planning software, has agreed to be bought by RedPrairie, a privately held developer of supply chain execution and warehouse management software, for $1.9 billion. When fully merged, the new RedPrairie will have about $1 billion in annual revenue, and compete globally with Oracle and SAP. However, a wide mix of platforms used by both companies raises new questions on the long-term plan for JDA’s loyal IBM i customer base. Rumors started swirling a week ago that JDA Software had hired JPMorgan Chase to handle JDA’s

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• MSPs Expand IBM i DR and HA Practices

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If there’s a silver lining to the giant cloud that was Superstorm Sandy, it’s that it has shined a light on the need for companies to establish and practice disaster recovery (DR) plans. IBM i shops are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) to assist with their DR and high availability (HA) planning. In recent weeks, three MSPs, including Corus360, Recovery Point, and DataStorage Corp., announced upgrades to their DR and HA practices. Corus360 is a large Atlanta, Georgia-based value added reseller (VAR) with a subsidiary called RES-Q that provides a range of DR and business

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• Infor Gives EAM an iPad Interface

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations using enterprise asset management (EAM) software from Infor can now interact with that software through an iPad, the company announced last week. EAM Mobile provides an extension to several Infor EAM products, and will be particularly beneficial to workers in the field or remote locations. Infor offers several EAM products, including EAM Enterprise, EAM Enterprise Sustainability, and MP2. All of the products are based on the MP2 software that Infor obtained with its Datastream acquisition in 2006; it rebranded it EAM Enterprise in 2007. Both products run only on Windows and Unix servers, but as Infor10 applications, they can

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