• Dell Goes After IBM Mainframe And Midrange Apps

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The road is littered with the smoking hulks of the upstart system companies and smaller software firms that have tried to attack the IBM proprietary midrange and mainframe platforms over the past four decades. And based on two key acquisitions last week, it looks like PC and server maker Dell is gearing up to take a more direct run at the System z mainframe and its baby brother, the Power Systems-IBM i platform. Yeah, that ought to prick up more than a few ears in the IBM i market, and perhaps get more than a few vendors of application modernization

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• Checking For Cracks In The Technology Foundation

  April 9, 2012 Dan Burger

  Have you ever come face to face with the reality that you are not getting what you paid for? You make IT investments like a Power Systems server running IBM i, but don’t come close to taking full advantage of the platform. The sad truth is that your hardware and software are loaded with unused capabilities. You paid for them, but you get value out of only the features you use. It’s sort of like paying the cable TV company for 150 channels, but never watching more than 10. This is not a recent phenomenon, but it does seem to

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Not Weather, Nor Whether But When

  April 9, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In 1974, a band of self-styled revolutionaries, the Weather Underground published Prairie Fire, a manifesto explaining why and how to replace the government of the United States. Not only didn’t this happen, but two of the principals, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, have a couple kids and mundane jobs as college teachers. If they were out to change the world today, they’d be writing revolutionary apps, not manifestos, or composing essays praising or damning those apps. And just what are those transformational apps doing? Putting money where our mouths are: In our phones. For the past few years, people

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• Maxava iFoundation Renews Grant Funding For Second Year

  April 9, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  It is not hard to get a room full of IBM i advocates to agree that more needs to be done to support and promote their beloved platform. But agreeing on the best ways to further the IBM i community can result in heated debate. Rather than jump into the fray, IBM i high availability and disaster recovery software developer Maxava decided to give nonprofit groups the means to offer some solutions, in the form of cold hard cash. Maxava launched the iFoundation in March 2011 with the mission of offering financial assistance to front-line, not-for-profit organizations in their work

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• Reader Feedback On IBM i Versus Oracle JDE, Smart IBM i Shops Get Connected

  April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just wanted to note that for current IBM i customers like me, the Power 750 comparison doesn’t ring true. I have JDE World (yes, World) running on two IBM i machines, a System i 550 and a Power 720. We’re looking at new ERP systems for one of the companies right now but I doubt whether I can use any of this info because our upgrade path for the System i 550 box is a Power 720 with four to eight processors, not a Power 750. We’re currently running the company comfortably on four Power6+ processors so we wouldn’t even

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• 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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