• Two Factors In The IBM i Migration Equation

  March 26, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There comes a time in every corporation’s life when it must confront the “m” word and consider migrating computer systems. Whether the company uses Windows or IBM i or Unix or z/OS, its leaders will inevitably make a decision to either stick with what they’ve got, or move to something different. Companies running IBM i face a unique set of circumstances that work both ways in the migration equation, including a skills shortage and sticky ERP systems. The mad rush toward mobile, cloud, and social computing has IBM i shops re-thinking their business application strategy. Just as IBM i professionals

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• Flashback: Clearly A Mainframe, Nearly The Perfect One

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  TFH Back in September 1992, when the E95 quad-processor AS/400 came out and IBM was in the midst of a major reorganization as its mainframe business was imploding and Lou Gerstner was about six months away from being named the first outside CEO of Big Blue in its history, I jotted down a wish list of the things that I thought IBM needed to do to make the AS/400 a more general purpose platform. Back then, The Four Hundred was only available as a paper newsletter on a subscription basis, so very few of you have ever read this wish

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• Oracle Software Rebounds, Hardware Struggles

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Oracle’s software business deflated a bit in its second quarter of fiscal 2012 ended back in November 2011, but software was on the rebound in the third quarter ended in February and the company remained hopeful about its long-term prospects in the systems business thanks to its “engineered systems” and despite its backing out of commodity server and storage sales that don’t make it any money. In the quarter, which had an extra day in it thanks to leap year, Oracle’s revenues were up 3 percent, to just a hair over $9 billion. Of that, software license, update, and support

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• Tell IBM All About Your Power Systems Iron

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time here at IT Jungle poking around looking for interesting things to tell you about that relate either directly or obliquely to the IBM i platform. I stumbled across an interesting item the other day I wanted to make you aware of. I am not sure how long IBM has been doing this, but the company is soliciting customers who use its Power Systems midrange servers and zEnterprise mainframe servers to have their voices heard and write a review for the iron that they use. IBM is also soliciting reviews for its Storwize V7000, DS8000,

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• Sharing In V6

  March 21, 2012 Jon Paris

  Some time ago I read Ted Holt’s Guru tip Sharing Simplifies Source Code in which he showed an approach to building reports in a modular programming environment. At the time I can remember thinking that it would be interesting to see how V6 RPG’s ability to pass files as parameters might offer an even simpler approach. Simpler, that is, once you know how to pass files as parameters! Well, it has taken me almost a year, but I finally got round to working on it, and I confess I rather like the results. Ted’s original approach required that a driver

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• *NOMAX Does Not Mean Infinite Capacity

  March 21, 2012 Hey, Ted

  The practice in our shop has been to set the initial size of physical files to what seems to be a reasonable value. In many cases, we leave the size at the default value of 10,000 records with three increments of 1,000 records each. Sometimes we change one or more of these values, usually the first one. Someone has suggested that we stop the guesswork and create all files with SIZE(*NOMAX). However, someone else is afraid that a program will go into a loop and fill up the disk space with output operations. Who’s right? –Flora I agree with the

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• Four Simple Rules For IBM i PTF Management

  March 21, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Talking with an IBM Business Partner this week, the conversation turned to PTF management and the best ways for managing cumulative PTFs. Inspired by this talk, I came up with these four simple rules for a good PTF management strategy. Rule 1: Don’t Let Your PTFs Age A lot of shops only apply PTFs when they upgrade their hardware, but many (or most) shops are also frequently upgrading their application software. Frequent application changes can create new processing situations that test the limits of a partition’s Licensed Internal Code (LIC) and operating system fixes. In a rapidly changing applications environment,

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• PSGi Unveils Customer Support Lifeline for Aged IBM i ERP Systems

  March 20, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Companies that find it increasingly difficult to get good help for their old, unsupported, or heavily customized IBM i-based ERP systems may be interested in a new offering recently unveiled by Precision Solutions Group (PSGi). The company is expanding its existing technical support business, which covers the PRMS, PRISM, and JDE World systems, to include just about any manufacturing- or distribution-focused ERP system that runs on the IBM i platform. The rise in popularity of the third-party maintenance business is directly tied to the lack of value that customers perceive they get from ERP vendors. Third-party support providers like Rimini

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• Fresche Legacy Debuts with Newly Acquired Code Converter for IBM i

  March 20, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The company formerly known as Speedware is today officially changing its name to Fresche Legacy. CEO Andy K. says the new name better reflects the new direction the Montreal, Quebec, company has taken in recent years. Along with the name change, Fresche Legacy today is expected to announce the acquisition of the iModernize suite of RPG migration tools from the German company Sykora. The name Fresche Legacy is officially one day old, but the company behind it has an eventful 36-year legacy. Originally founded as Info-Boutique and later called Infocentre, the company focused on developing applications for travel

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• Arpeggio Unveils Free IBM i ZIP Utility

  March 20, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Arpeggio Software unveiled a free utility last month that enables the zipping and unzipping of files on the IBM i server. ARP-ZIP, as the software is called, supports a variety of common zip file formats, and also gives users the capability to encrypt files. It does this while running natively on the IBM i server and providing a 5250 interface. Arpeggio’s new ARP-ZIP supports the capability to compress or archive IBM i files using many commonly used zip file formats, including ZIP, TAR, JAR, GZIP, and BZIP2. It also supports the capability to encrypt and decrypt compressed

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