• IBM Sells Retail Systems Biz To Rival Toshiba For $850 Million

  April 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  IBM, the global leader in point of sale and related retail store systems, has checked out. Big Blue has bagged another portion of its hardware business, and the IBM cash register is singing to the tune of $850 million. Stepping up as buyer and partner is Toshiba TEC, which cartwheels from fourth to first in the POS field leaving behind the likes of Hewlett Packard, NCR, Panasonic, and Fujitsu. That trio has yet to react to the sale and multi-year agreement between IBM and Toshiba, which creates a formidable tandem. Toshiba, which is Japan’s

  …

  Read more

• IBM Rochester Gets A Piece Of the PureSystems Action

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The PureSystems converged system platform might be largely a product of IBM‘s System x division, which was officially renamed the Modular Systems division several years ago but no one uses the name. But the Power Systems division has a hand in the design and manufacturing of the machines, too, as it turns out. Tim Alpers, a local product manager at IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility, told the local Post-Bulletin newspaper that the PureSystems launch “was a big deal” for the facility, which had a hand in the research and design of the converged systems and will be taking part in

  …

  Read more

• What’s Your Digital Personality?

  April 23, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  No, you haven’t accidentally clicked over to the results of the latest Teen Beat poll. IBM recently released the results of a survey that reveals an individual’s digital behavior, part of IBM’s continued effort to help its customers understand and capture the elusive and growing digital consumer. You might be wondering how this news is relevant to the IBM i aficionados who rely on IT Jungle for all things i-related? So let’s go straight to the most interesting finding from this survey before we hash through the details and discover your digital personality: IBM’s Beyond Digital study discovered that the

  …

  Read more

• Coglin Mill And Help/Systems Tag Team For Analytics

  April 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  It’s fair to say business analytics on the IBM i platform has a more serious business attitude compared to some of the lightweight activities that get lumped into this category on less robust systems. And you’ve probably heard the complaints about insufficient analytical capabilities that do little or nothing to solve real business problems. The failure of deployments to achieve the hoped for objectives shakes the confidence of CEOs contemplating business intelligence projects at all levels. It also raises questions about the wisdom of taking data from the IBM i platform and feeding databases on other platforms when the decision

  …

  Read more

• A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters

  April 18, 2012 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Too often we humans give little thought to what we do or why we do it, even though taking an organized approach to an activity has its advantages. In this article, I present one approach to the handling of parameters in programs and tell why I consider this a good way to process parameters. Parameters are data that are supplied to a program in order to affect the way it behaves. For example, the ability to supply file names, member names, and various options to the Copy File

  …

  Read more

• Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

  April 18, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I did not take your suggestion to write a subprocedure and embed it in a service program. It seemed like too much trouble to me. I wrote a program instead. It does the trick and it’s a lot less complicated than all those hoops you told me to jump through. I guess ILE isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. –Chuck Chuck presented me with a problem. I suggested he write a subprocedure to solve it. He didn’t like the idea of creating a module, writing binder language, creating a service program from the module, adding the service program to

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Planning An i 6.1 Upgrade

  April 18, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  As of this writing, my staff and I are preparing to upgrade the first of three System i 550 partitions from i5/OS V5R4 to i 6.1 on April 14. In an earlier article, I discussed getting started with a 6.1 upgrade. As a case study, this issue I’ll go over the planning process for actually performing the upgrade by reviewing my planning process for an actual IBM i partition. Completing The Pre-Upgrade Tasks At this point, we’ve completed most of the heavy lifting needed to perform the upgrade. With our Applications group, we’ve gone through and corrected all system

  …

  Read more

• Velocity Sees Positive Trajectory in ERP Cloud Biz

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Remember when ERP was cool, when all the best companies were doing it? OK, while ERP might have been new for most companies in the roaring 1990s, it hasn’t been cool for a long time, if ever. Today, ERP is a necessary fact of life for companies, but it’s also expensive and time consuming. Some IT companies, like Velocity Technology Solutions, see major changes afoot in the way that we buy and consume ERP software–which could even make ERP cool. Velocity Technology Solutions is a cloud hosting provider that runs and maintains ERP and related systems for about 240

  …

  Read more

• GeneXus Refresh Targets Mobile Apps, Cloud Deployments

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Artech last month launched a new version of its rapid application development toolset, called GeneXus, that delivers new capabilities to deploy user interface apps to mobile devices based on the Apple iOS, RIM Blackberry, and Google Android platforms. GeneXus X Evolution 2, which supports the IBM i server through generation of Java, RPG, and COBOL, also features support for deployment of applications to the cloud. Artech is a creator of fourth-generation language (4GL) tools that was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1988 to support IBM‘s legendary AS/400 server line. While the bulk of Artech’s 6,500-plus customers are Latin American,

  …

  Read more

• DB2 Connect (Finally) Gets IBM i 7.1 Support

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM this month announced a new release of DB2 Connect, a piece of middleware used to connect client applications running on Linux, Unix, or Windows platforms to DB2 database servers running on IBM i and z/OS. With DB2 Connect version 10.1, IBM added support for DB2 for i version 7.1. It also added a number of features for taking advantages of the latest enhancements to DB2 for z/OS. DB2 Connect enables client applications to create, access, update, control, and manage DB2 databases on host systems using a variety of languages, including SQL, ODBC, JDBC, DB2 APIs, SQLJ DB2 Call Level

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles