• Zend Debuts Studio 10 Beta

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies used its annual ZendCon conference last month to unveil beta releases of three products, including Zend Studio 10, Zend Server 6, and Zend Server Gateway. While Zend wants customers to use all three products together, IBM i shops will be most interested in the beta of Zend Studio, which brings new cloud, mobile, and productivity features. Zend Studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a spectrum of tools for rapidly writing rich Internet applications, with PHP back ends, JavaScript and JQuery front ends, and REST Web services connecting them. Studio offers productivity features like code

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• Halcyon Delivers Japanese Version of Management Tools

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i systems management tool vendor Halcyon Software last month announced that its software is now available in the Japanese language. The U.K. firm says its complete line of products are now available in Japan, the second largest IBM i market in the world, after the United States. Halcyon says it did the development work of modifying its software to support double byte character sets (DBCS), while its Japanese partner SOLPAC, a Tokyo-based software and consulting firm that caters to the IBM midrange market, did the translation work. SOLPAC will sell Halcyon products in Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. “Halcyon

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• EMC Grabs Silver Tail to Fight Cyber Crime

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The world of cyber fraud and cyber warfare is undergoing a period of rapid transformation and expansion, and with last week’s acquisition of Web fraud detection company Silver Tail Systems, EMC shows that it plans to be in the thick of the battles. Cyber criminals are increasingly using sophisticated technology and novel approaches–such as blended attacks and polymorphic malware–to gain an edge over the good guys and crack the security of the good guys. The problem is that traditional signature-based security tools are no longer sufficient to differentiate between regular Web sessions and malicious Web sessions. This is especially

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• AquaFold Power Tool Gets Hip to Big Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Programmers and administrators faced with big data movement tasks may find the job a little easier with the latest release of AquaFold Aqua Data Studio, a power tool that provides graphical access to major databases, including DB2/400. Aqua Data Studio is a Java-based utility designed to provide programmers, database developers, and systems administrators with a single, consistent interface to work with databases. The product’s GUI lets users administer, explore, and query their databases and create SQL scripts. Additionally, it offers an entity relationship modeler; brings comparison tools for analyzing differences in files, directory structures, and database schemas; and has an

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• IBM i Top Concerns: Build Skills, Add High Availability, Serve Users

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As this newsletter so aptly demonstrates, you don’t have to be an IBM i shop to be intimately interconnected with the IBM i community and therefore have your own concerns about the health and wealth of the platform. The community is dominated by users, of course, but software developers, consultants, resellers, IBMers, and wiseguys like reporters and analysts all have skin in the game, and they voiced their opinions in the latest Top Concerns survey performed by COMMON Europe. First of all, for all of you who participated in this year’s Top Concerns survey, the seventh of which closed

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• Superstorm Sandy Puts DR Plans To The Ultimate Test

  November 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

  When Superstorm Sandy roared ashore a week ago, residents of the Northeast knew they would be in for a wild ride. Sandy didn’t disappoint, as she brought a record storm surge to the New York City area and devastated the Jersey Shore. The storm also poked hurricane-sized holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of some businesses, like those that placed backup generators in flood-prone areas. For some IBM i shops and managed service providers (MSPs), DR plans were strained but not broken, and gained the Sandy stamp of approval for good DR housekeeping. Before Sandy made landfall as a

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• Rumors Say JDA Software Slaps On For Sale Sign

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a very expansive, exciting, and sometimes exasperating couple of years for JDA Software, which has shored up its revenues streams and customer bases in retail and supply chain management software through a bunch of acquisitions, as well as losing a costly lawsuit against a big customer and having to restate its financials. Now, there are rumors going around Wall Street that JDA, which is a publicly held company, might have put itself up for sale. The rumors broke in a story from Reuters on October 29, just as Hurricane Sandy was preparing to punch the Mid-Atlantic

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Estranged Here In A Strained Land

  November 5, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  “Kafka,” said my doctor, checking for existential and inguinal strains. I was in satisfactory shape, he observed, which is more than one can say about Dell or Hewlett-Packard. Dell’s eponymous chief Michael is straining in vain to lift sales and profits; the way things are going he could end up with a financial hernia. Meg Whitman, HP’s boss, has similar difficulties; she might suffer a fiscal hisnia. I’m probably late pointing this out, because this very topic became the cover of the October 20 Barron’s magazine, and usually cautious Barron’s is more often a coincident reporter or

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• Testing For Success Sometimes Doomed To Failure

  November 5, 2012 Yvonne Enselman

  As my position has shifted from being a programmer to a tester, I have not lost interest in the IBM i world. How the platform functions and what trends drive development remain relevant to my job. If I don’t understand it, I can’t test it. While I find information that helps me grasp what the techies are doing, it is difficult to find information relevant to other teams in our i-focused publications. It’s time to start talking about application testing for IBM i developers and other IBM i professionals who don’t understand why platform matters. Starting from the developer point

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• Michigan LUG Members Face Reality-Based Web Query Training

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  There may be no better example of what a local user group should be than the educational programs run out of the Southeast Michigan iSeries Users Group. Last week, SMiUG and the Western Michigan IBM i User Group rolled up their sleeves and got to work on a project that is bringing together 37 members for a hands-on, learn-by-doing IBM Web Query experience. It will be a month-long, problem-solving exercise with the goal of completing two real-world projects for a pair of companies looking for modern query capabilities that include dashboards, drill-downs, and mobile components including iPhones and iPads.

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