• Infor Raises More Money, Finally Completes Lawson Transaction

  April 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor last week announced that it has fulfilled all of the financial requirements to finalize the acquisition of Lawson Software, which up to this point has been an Infor “affiliate” tucked away in an Infor subsidiary. While the $1.83 billion deal has been “done” since last July, when Infor officially announced the acquisition was complete, there were still some small details related to paying off Lawson’s old debt. Infor made its first unsolicited bid to buy Lawson (then a public company) for $11.25 per share back in March 2011, and the boards of the two companies came to

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• Job Growth Stalls In March, IT A Mixed Bag

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Is the economy doing better or worse? Is the monthly jobs report that comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics any kind of real indicator, or is it massaged so much with seasonal adjustments and other stat tricks that it is more like an impressionist painting of the economy than a picture? I don’t know, but I sometimes have my doubts about what is going on with the unemployment rate and job counts that the Department of Labor puts out after it surveys 160,000 businesses and 60,000 homes each month to find out who is employing and who is

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• Avnet Jumps For WebSphere, Rational Services Provider

  April 9, 2012 Dan Burger

  Mastering the mechanics of managing information technology investments to be properly aligned with business goals is a skill that won’t go unrewarded. Ascendant Technology has done a pretty good job with that. Avnet, one of the giant master resellers in the IT business, took notice. Last week Avnet announced it was acquiring Ascendant, a move that emphasizes the importance of services in the current and future IT market. “Avnet’s acquisition of Ascendant Technology is expected to accelerate our global solutions distribution model,” said Phil Gallagher, global president of Avnet Technology Solutions. “It supports our strategic focus on enhancing our

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• IBM Codes History Of Modern Math iPad App

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On April 7, 1964, two weeks before the World’s Fair opened up in Flushing, Queens, one and a half borough hops from where I sit as I write The Four Hundred each week, IBM announced a machine that still, to a large degree, defines what a system is. It was the System/360 mainframe, of course, and we sometimes forget how exotic computers were at the time, and indeed mathematics and information theory as well. By the way, the 1965 Ford Mustang–the only car I ever really want to own, if I ever do own a car again, and make mine

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• Index Advisor, Part 1

  April 4, 2012 Paul Tuohy

  The use of SQL within our applications is on the increase. After a shaky start in the early days of the AS/400, SQL has gone from strength to strength with every release of the operating system. The use of embedded SQL (in RPG) stabilized with V5R1 and really came into its own when free-form SQL was introduced in V5R4 and PTFed back to V5R3. But with SQL, and embedded SQL especially, there is always that lingering doubt about SQL performance when accessing data. We have all heard horror stories about the lights in the building dimming when a certain program

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• Cut the Gordian Knot

  April 4, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I just love those BIFs that IBM added to RPG. I can’t understand why anybody would use old RPG op codes instead of the BIFs. But I’ve run into a brick wall with %SUBST. Help! –Vince Allow me to explain Vince’s situation. He was assigned to revise a program someone else had written. The program reads a list of the file names in a certain directory on their network, and has to do other processing depending on file name extension (the part of the name following the last period). Here’s a program similar to the one that Vince had to

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• Admin Alert: Readers Check in on Four Simple Rules for PTFs

  April 4, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  After posting my March 21st article on Four Simple Rules for PTF Management, I received so much good information from our readers on PTFs that I decided to pass it along in this follow-up column. Here’s some additional tips and techniques on PTF management that might make it easier to apply PTF fixes on your IBM i machines. Q: When does IBM refresh a Cume PTF package? A: Never Reader Richard Shearwood wrote in with this piece of information about whether IBM corrects cumulative PTF packages containing bad PTFs after the package is released. IBM never refreshed a cume

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• Raz-Lee Claims IBM i Data-Access Breakthrough with DB-Gate

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security last week unveiled DB-Gate, a new database connectivity product that gives IBM i applications direct access to other databases using native IBM i SQL commands and procedures. The vendor, which is best known for its security software, claims its new patent-pending product is revolutionary because it accomplishes something that previously was difficult to do without using complicated middleware or proprietary interfaces. For all the talk of openness and adherence to standards, the IBM i platform is surprisingly shut off when it comes to enabling IBM i applications to have direct, real-time access to foreign databases. It’s not really

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• Quadrant Launches Fax Over IP Software

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software today is expected to launch QuadraDocV, a new fax over IP (FoIP) software offering for IBM i shops. The new FoIP software runs inside a VMware virtual machine and offers the same fax capabilities that Quadrant has delivered for years with its hardware-based FastFax line of products. Customers are expected to gain by eliminating hardware from their data centers and canceling subscriptions for analog phone lines. Following the success of voice over IP (VoIP), FoIP is now gaining steam in business environments. Many organizations have already installed VoIP-enabled network switches from the major manufactures, such as Cisco or

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• Zend Says DBi is Very Close to General Availability

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technology is about two weeks away from announcing the general availability of DBi, its drop-in replacement for the MySQL database running on the IBM i, which is important for running PHP apps on the platform. The company had expected to ship the software months ago. But an extra round of testing was done to ensure that the much-anticipated product would work as advertised. DBi is the result of a collaboration between Zend and IBM to address the problem created when Oracle dropped MySQL support for the IBM i OS in late 2010. MySQL support on the IBM i platform

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