• Help/Systems Makes ABSTRACT Accessible Within RDP

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The ABSTRACT suite of cross-reference and documentation tools is now accessible from within the IBM i platform’s main development tool, Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP). The new feature, which was included with the ABSTRACT version 10.27 released by Help/Systems last week, will make it easier for IBM i programmers to foresee the impact their changes may have on other programs without leaving the RDP environment. ABSTRACT is a powerful utility that provides IBM i programmers with critical information about their applications. The software builds an IBM i-resident database of system objects and procedures, and through this database, the software

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• Jasper Hunts for ‘Big Data’ Trophies with Talend’s Hooks for Hadoop

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Open source business intelligence software developer Jaspersoft has added new tools for accessing “big data” sets through Jaspersoft ETL, the extract, transform, and load (ETL) software that it OEMs from Talend. The latest release of the company’s tools includes better support for the Apache Hadoop big data framework. As one of the latest big trends in IT, big data refers to the problems organizations face as they attempt to store, manage, and process huge amounts of data. While the bottom and upper limits vary depending on the application, many midsized businesses will struggle when faced with tens or hundreds

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• ACOM Touts WebView Use at Grecian Delight

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Paper-based processes are no longer the productivity bottleneck they once were at the Chicago-based Greek food company Grecian Delight Foods. Thanks to the WebView software from ACOM Solutions, the company has transitioned from paper- and fax-based processes to electronic document distribution, which has freed more time for Grecian to concentrate on customer service. Pushing the paper was becoming a burden for the folks at Grecian Delight Foods, which ships specialty Greek and other ethnic cuisine across the country via a network of 400 distributors and 50 brokers. Jerry Czupryn, the company’s IT manager, explained the problem in a recent

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• CCSS Cuts the IT Operations Fat with New ‘Cheat Sheet’

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are notoriously lean when it comes to the efficiency of their operations. And while the Great Recession forced many of us to find new and creative ways to further slash costs to the bone, a new “cheat sheet” from CCSS shows there’s still some fat to be trimmed when it comes to systems management. “Quite often it can feel as though all the fat has already been trimmed and there is simply no excess or flexibility with which IT managers can make further changes,” CCSS president and CEO Ray Wright says in a press release. “It requires

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• New Templates Added to mrc Dev Tool

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Development tool maker mrc last week announced the addition of two new templates–the cross-tab report template and the data upload template–to its flagship product, m-Power. m-Power is a Web application development tool that uses a template-based approach to enable rapid delivery of new programs and functionality. After configuring new programs from pre-defined templates, m-Power generates Java code that runs on IBM i and all Java-enabled platforms. The new cross-tab report template makes it easy for developers to create a special type of report that combines row data with user-selected column data. The vendor says these types of reports are great

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• Dell ‘Wyses’ Up with Thin Client Acquisition

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Dell swooped in yesterday and acquired Wyse Technology, the well-known provider of thin clients and desktop virtualization products to companies around the world. If approved, the deal will give Dell’s desktop virtualization business a shot in the arm and bolster its existing OptiFlex thin client business. It will also give Dell 180 patents. According to Dell, Wyse ranked number one in thin client unit shipment volume during the fourth quarter of 2011, and has more than 20 million thin client units in the field, where they are used by 200 million people around the world every day. The San

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• IBM’s Next Generation Platform Prepped For Launch

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What IBM has been calling its “Next Generation Platform” internally and when talking to business partners that have been briefed in the past several weeks, and what it is calling “expert integrated systems” in its promotions appear to be a warm up for the launch event set for April 11. And it looks very similar in concept to the Flex Platform I caught wind of and told you about back in February. There will be some bigwigs at IBM handling the NGP launch, which will take place in a webcast at 2 p.m. Eastern on April 11: I

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• Making A Case For IBM i

  April 2, 2012 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community has never suffered from a lack of advocates. Those who know it best know it to be a highly capable platform with many attributes that make it superior in many ways to other platforms. The Smarter Computing message that IBM has built its marketing message around is IBM i computing. There are innovative businesses around the world proving this. And there are companies that have resisted change riding the old AS/400 horse for far too long with little or no attempt to move with the system into the modern world. The overall perception of the platform

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• IBM i Versus Oracle JDE Throwdown Redux

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When looking at a complex problem on deadline, you rarely get everything right the first time, or do as thorough a job as you would like. My price/performance analysis of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne “Day In The Life” benchmark test on various Oracle Sparc T and IBM Power Systems and System x iron is no exception. A reader with very intimate knowledge shared a little insight, and I added some more vectors to the comparison. Hi, Timothy: I just read your newsletter article today. It was very thorough as expected from you. I just had a comment to make. We

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• As I See It: You’ve Got Interviews

  April 2, 2012 Victor Rozek

  High traffic websites require a daily supply of new material to entertain the surfing masses. But curing the ills of the terminally jaded requires taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic approach: provide a wide variety of postings as remedy for a wide variety of tastes, from the serious to the vacuous. On Yahoo!, for example, you can find everything from video of the Annual Wife-Carrying Obstacle Race (my wife and my back decided to abstain this year), to Rick Santorum insisting that he doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Sometimes it’s hard to know where vacuous ends and serious begins. On

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