• As I See It: No, It’s Not Painless

  March 19, 2012 Victor Rozek

  In the hierarchy of bad work days, having a colleague hurl herself out of a fourth story window ranks right up there near the top. Though thankfully rare, workplace suicide is on the rise, a reflection of mounting desperation as, for many, economic options run out. A single telecommunications company in France (the former employer of the fourth floor flyer) had a horrific, mind-boggling string of 23 employee suicides. The company had been busy restructuring–a pallid euphemism for discarding workers–and apparently forgot it was altering lives as well as spreadsheets. Back home, where compassion and corporation have become all but

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• COMMON Turning Up the Value

  March 19, 2012 Dan Burger

  Whenever you think about the community of IBM i users who are not only advocates of the IBM midrange platform, but are also advocating training and education that keeps up with technology, the COMMON user group comes to mind. COMMON has had its ups and downs and has had to make adjustments, just like the individuals and the companies in the community have to. In about six weeks COMMON will host its annual conference. The organization’s president, Pete Massiello, promises it will once again showcase the positive turnaround. Registrations are exceeding what was on the books for the 2011 conference

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• Townsend Security CEO John Earl Steps Down

  March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, security software vendor Townsend Security said that John Earl, the company’s president and CEO for nearly three years and a beloved and well-known OS/400 and IBM security expert, had to step down for health reasons from those positions. Many of you know Earl from his years at PowerTech and all of the work he has done for COMMON and other local user groups over the years, and it goes without saying that Earl is one of the most important and influential people in our IBM i community. This is why he ended up running Townsend Security. Patrick Townsend,

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• Quadrant And Mainline Seal Partner Deal

  March 19, 2012 Dan Burger

  Quadrant Software, makers of document management and fax products for IBM i and other platforms, and Mainline Information Systems, one of the largest resellers of IBM Power Systems, mainframes, and System x machines in the United States, have a new partnership. Mainline gains a product line that fits in well with the infrastructure its customers have in place and that will meet customer needs relating to business process issues, productivity, improved efficiencies and lower costs. Quadrant benefits by gaining access to a new and quite large customer base that has come to trust the Mainline name and way

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• Obama Encourages Engineering Students To Stay With It

  March 19, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Getting an engineering degree is hard. The work involved in obtaining one is not to be taken lightly, but the rewards awaiting graduates are worth the effort required. That was the consensus among panel members at a live Facebook Webcast last week, which was held in conjunction with the launch of Stay With It, an online resource to support engineering students in an effort to increase the number of engineering graduates from U.S. universities and colleges. The Stay With It program is the result of an initiative from the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, in partnership with Intel,

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• IBM Starts Refurbishing Power Systems Machines In China

  March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM makes Power Systems machinery in China to sell to customers in certain parts of the globe, and now the company has opened up a refurbishing center that will be taking back machines in trade and refurbishing them for resale in the country. IBM has opened up a server and PC refurbishing center near one of its factories in Shenzhen, China, which will be run by the company’s Global Asset Recovery Services division, part of its Global Financing group. The facility is starting out modestly and will only represent a tiny portion of the iron that Global Asset Recovery Services

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• Disk Array Sales Keep Expanding Despite Drive Shortages

  March 19, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The relentless pace of disk capacity improvements and the impressive price/performance gains with every new generation of disk were more than offset by rapacious demand for storage to help the disk array business grow in the final quarter of 2011. And despite disk shortages due to the flooding in Thailand (where about a quarter of the world’s disks are made) and jittery economies in the United States and Western Europe. According to the box counters at Gartner, sales of external disk arrays that make use of controllers (as distinct from internal disk arrays like those inside of many X86

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• ASNA ‘Bulks’ Up with Wings 5.2

  March 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  When customers started using Wings, ASNA‘s new screen modernization tool for IBM i applications, the company was in for a bit of a surprise. While the company expected customers to modernize more than one screen at a time, it wasn’t expecting customers to tackle thousands of screens simultaneously. This led to one of the major new features in the just-released Wings 5.2, called “Flight Plans,” which enables users to track their progress with the ASNA tool. Wings is one of a new class of Web-based modernization tools that uses Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, the IBM technology that debuted

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• Profound Updates RPG OA Screen Modernization Tool

  March 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  With nearly two years of use in the field, Profound Logic is getting good feedback from customers about the changes it would like to see in Profound UI, the 5250 screen modernization tool that uses the Rational Open Access: RPG Edition (RPG OA) technology from IBM. Many of those changes are being showcased in Profound UI version 3.3, which the vendor unveiled in January. But the biggest changes are being prepped for launch at the May COMMON show. When it shipped in April 2010 Profound UI was the first commercially available screen modernization tool to use the RPG Open

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• Halcyon Overcomes IBM i Spool File Limits

  March 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform excels at handling big data. Its integrated database allows customers to handle large amounts of data with relative ease. Just the same, there are some limits in the OS when it comes to spool files that some IBM i shops have managed to meet. With the latest release of its Spooled File Manager, Halcyon Software has enabled these customers to overcome these limits and continue to process and store an ever-growing collection of spool files. Spooled File Manager is an IBM i product designed to streamline the distribution and long-term storage of spool files generated by

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