• What Could IBM Do Instead Of Spending $12.2 Billion On Shares?

  October 31, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just ahead of naming Ginni Rometty the president and chief executive officer of IBM effective January 1, the board of directors of the company got down to a little traditional business, hiring a new board member and allocating funds for Big Blue to keep trotting down to Wall Street to buy back billions of dollars of its shares. The new board member is David Farr, who is chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric, a manufacturer of air conditioners and commercial power and cooling systems, among other things, that also happens to be a big player in the data center racket

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• 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values

  October 26, 2011 Ted Holt

  Imagine not being allowed to code *FIRST in the MBR parameter of the Override with Database File (OVRDBF) command. Horrible thought, isn’t it? Special values make commands more sensible and easy to use. Here are 10 facts every IBM i developer should know in order to effectively use special values in his own commands. 1. Special values are character strings that are incompatible with validity checking rules. In this example, BATCH requires a three-digit number, and *ALL does not fit that description. PARM KWD(BATCH) + TYPE(*DEC) LEN(3 0) + DFT(*ALL) + REL(*GT 0) + SPCVAL((*ALL -1)) + PROMPT('Batch number')</all> 2.

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• VALUES: A Truly Useless DDS Keyword

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Ted

  We had a recent crisis in our shop. When we dug to the root of the problem, we found that one of our files had an invalid value in one of the fields. I don’t understand why this was the case, because the programmer who wrote the DDS used the VALUES keyword on the field in question. Does the VALUES keyword not prevent invalid data from entering the database? –Paul No, Paul. One would think it does, but use of the VALUES keyword only applies to the workstation controller. That is, only the green-screen interface is restricted by the VALUES

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• Limiting How Much Memory a Storage Pool Can Allocate

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Joe

  I want to run the i OS Performance Adjuster to automatically allocate system memory to my subsystems. But when I turn it on, most of the memory goes to the *INTERACT storage pool used by the QINTER subsystem. I want to take care of interactive users, but I also want some memory left over for other subsystems. How do I limit *INTERACT from using too much memory? –Jens This sometimes happens with using the i operating system automatic performance adjustment feature. By default in the i 6.1 operating system, the Performance Adjustment (QPFRADJ) system value is set to “2”. This

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• Where’s the IBM-Based IBM i Cloud Offering?

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  It was with great fanfare earlier this month that IBM unveiled its updated Power Systems hardware and software lineup. Updated servers with better memory, I/O, and networking connections, along with a Technology Refresh of the IBM i OS and supporting software cast gave IBM i customers a lot to chew on. And there was even a new Power Systems-based cloud solution unveiled. Could this finally be the AS/400-based cloud everybody’s been waiting for? Alas, no. The great white hope from Big Blue remains just that: all hope and no reality. Dig a little deeper into IBM’s October 12 cloud announcement

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• Coglin Mill’s ETL Makes Data Warehousing on IBM i More Attractive

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to data warehousing, there are still some in the IBM i community who think that workload belongs on Windows or Unix boxes. But with its integrated database, huge scalability, and fair DASD costs, there are no good reasons today why the IBM i server can’t perform this function. And with the latest release of its extract, transform, and load (ETL) software, the folks at Coglin Mill are giving customers an important tool for enabling the IBM i server to be the workhorse of their data warehouses. There’s no better way to get Alan Jordan’s goad than to

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• UNIT4 CODA Asserts Itself with ‘Destination: Control’ Release

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  There’s nothing worse than loose or wobbly financials. Your company’s core business could be running along great, just the picture of order and efficiency, yet be overshadowed by the mess that is your general ledger, AP, AR, and related processes. UNIT4 CODA, which touts itself as a provider of best-in-breed accounting software, hopes to help its customers get a handle on their financials with the 12th major revision of its flagship Coda Financials software, codenamed “Destination: Control.” Coda Financials is a Java-based application that includes general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, project accounting, billing, budgeting and forecasting, spend management,

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• Townsend Adds Open PGP Encryption to MFT Software

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Townsend Security‘s managed file transfer (MFT) software for IBM i now sports OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption capabilities, the company announced last week. Alliance FTP Manager version 5.3 gives customers the option of using the new open source PGP feature or the pre-existing enterprise-level PGP feature based on software licensed from PGP Corp. (now owned by Symantec). Better reporting and file-scan features round out this release. Alliance FTP Manager is a well-established secure file transfer solution that has been providing MFT capabilities to IBM i shops for years–well before the term “MFT” became so popular. The software historically

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• IBS Launches New Cloud and Mobile Apps for ERP Customers

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  ERP vendor International Business Systems (IBS), which was recently acquired by Symphony Technology Group, made a slew of aggressive product launches at its annual global user group conference this month. In one fell swoop, the embattled software vendor launched a hosted cloud environment for IBS Enterprise, unveiled new mobile interfaces for its ERP software, announced new sales and operations planning and performance management products, and debuted a new application exchange for customers. It’s been a tough few years for IBS, the Swedish ERP application developer that was bought this June by the Silicon Valley-based private equity group STG for

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• Rocket Seagull ‘100 Percent Committed’ to RPG Open Access

  October 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software and its Seagull subsidiary are “100 percent committed” to using Rational Open Access: RPG Edition software to help customers modernize and extend their 5250 applications, a senior Rocket product manager told IT Jungle last week, putting to rest any question regarding the company’s support and future plans for using the IBM technology. “Rocket Software is 100 percent committed to OA:RPG,” Sam Elias, Rocket vice president and general manager of application development, integration, and modernization, said via email last week. “As is our standard practice, we have not yet publicly announced the features for our next release of LegaSuite

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