• System Biz Growth Can’t Offset Component Slump At Arrow

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Weakening macroeconomic conditions in Europe and Asia made for a rougher than usual first quarter for Arrow Electronics, one of the two big master resellers in the world for systems and electronic components. However, the systems business was up and the components business was down, which is a better sign than you might otherwise think. During the first quarter ended in March, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Systems group posted sales of $1.54 billion, up 15.2 percent compared to the year ago period and posted an operating income of $55.5 million, up 42 percent. But the Arrow components biz shrank by

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• Avnet Components And Technology Solutions Businesses Both Slip

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Master reseller Avnet had a somewhat different quarter from rival Arrow Electronics in its most recent quarter, its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended in March. Both its components and systems groups took a hit. In the quarter, Avnet’s Technology Solutions group, which buys systems, storage, software, and services from IT vendors and distributes them through channel partners worldwide, had an 8.1 percent revenue decline, to $2.52 billion. Sales in the Americas region for Technology Solutions fell 9.1 percent to $1.37 billion, and in EMEA they dropped 12.1 percent to $744.8 million; in Asia, sales were up 4 percent to $409.3

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• Do The Twin Cities Two Stop With Help/Systems And RJS Software

  May 14, 2012 Dan Burger

  Two IBM i software vendors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area–with the IBM i homestead in Rochester just down the road–have user conferences planned for mid-September. You couldn’t pick a better time, weather-wise, to explore the upper Midwest, so why not pick up some technical knowledge at the same time? Help/Systems, an automation software vendor, will set up in downtown Minneapolis September 17 to 20. RJS Software, the document management and business process company, will host its event at the company headquarters in Burnsville September 18 through 20. The agenda for Help/Systems will include topics on IBM i operations,

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• Connectria Adds Fourth Data Center And AIX Cloud

  May 14, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  For once, growing clouds aren’t a sign of gloomy days ahead. At least not for Connectria Hosting, which currently provides cloud computing, managed hosting, and custom hosting solutions to more than 1,000 customers in more than 30 countries worldwide. IT Jungle recently reported on Connectria’s plans to host public and private IBM i clouds. Now comes news of the addition of a fourth data center at Connectria to accommodate growing demand. The new data center will be located in a CyrusOne facility in Lewisville, Texas. The data center is a Tier 4 designated facility, which is the highest

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• OLAP Is Simple, Once You Understand It

  May 9, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I have a problem that I solved with a simple RPG program, but I know it can be done with SQL as well. I needed to generate a simple table of employee ID, name, and average of the last five weeks paychecks. Is this simple or complicated to do with SQL? –Barry You are correct that SQL can do the calculation, Barry. However, you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s simple or complicated. First, let’s get some data to work with. I’m going to simplify your question slightly by using a name only, without an ID, to identify an

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• The Proper Way To Deallocate A Pointer

  May 9, 2012 Ted Holt

  Jerry Clower used to tell a story about attending a rattlesnake roundup. He said that people from the humane society were on hand to be sure that the rattlesnakes were killed properly. Mr. Clower remarked that he didn’t know that there was an improper way to kill a rattlesnake. Pointers can be like rattlesnakes, biting you when you don’t expect it. Do you know the proper way to kill a pointer? Use the %ALLOC function to allocate memory to a program. The system copies the address of the memory into a pointer variable. D SomePointer s D SomeData s 256a

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• Admin Alert: Prepping For And Responding To An Unheard Of IBM i #FAIL

  May 9, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  In the past six months, I’ve had three occasions where two of the six IBM i partitions I manage have needed emergency IPLs to restart their systems. This is unusual for an IBM i installation and it got me thinking what could have been done to avoid the issue and how I could have reacted better after the issue occurred. This article summarizes what I’ve learned from these experiences. This Ain’t Windows, You Know These emergency situations occurred on a Power 720 i 6.1 partition (one emergency) and a Power 6 550 partition (two emergencies). While it’s not as unusual

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• Infor and Abacus Launch ‘System i Cloud’

  May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  ERP developer Infor is getting into the cloud business with its hosting partner, Abacus. Several of Infor’s IBM i-based ERP applications will be offered under the new cloud offering, which will also give customers access to professional services to help them upgrade their ERP software and their IBM i OS. The partners are expected to announce their joint offering, which is called the System i Cloud, during the COMMON conference at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California this week. Abacus Solutions has been providing cloud hosting through its IBM “i” in the Cloud offering for the last three years.

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• Peppermill Gets Fast Results with IBM i Data Warehouse

  May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There is a stream of thought among business intelligence software vendors that says the IBM i server is a lousy place to put a data warehouse. But that bias didn’t sway the IT folks at Peppermill Resorts, a Reno, Nevada-based chain of casino resorts that recently went live on an IBM i-based data warehouse that has resulted in much faster data extracts, much fresher data for marketing analysis, and significantly speedier production systems. Peppermill Resorts is the largest privately held casino group in Nevada. The company runs six casinos (five with hotels) in Reno, Sparks, Henderson, and Wendover. In addition

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• Profound Declares Platform Independence Day

  May 8, 2012 Dan Burger

  How do you transform application modernization from something that appeals to techno geeks who love the challenge of coding magic into something that gets the attention of the C-level executives with the big picture business plans? Make it simple and make it platform independent. And let them know the in-house IT skills can handle the job. That pretty much sums up what Profound Logic has done with its latest release of Profound UI. Credit the product development team at Profound with its continual efforts in adding enhancements to its tools for building Web and mobile applications as well as modernizing

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