• Mad Dog 21/21: Preoccupy Wall Street

  October 17, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  IBM has almost always been a darling of Wall Street. It is Big Blue, the bluest of the blue chips. This year IBM shares have risen more than any of the other 29 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; they currently sell for about 13 times earnings. Hewlett-Packard is also a DJII component. It has significantly higher revenue than IBM. For the past five years it has grown faster, too. It sells a larger number of servers than Big Blue. But its name is mud on Wall Street. HP’s price/earnings ratio is half that of IBM. How come? Looking

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• UNICOM Acquires ITSM and z/OS Software Companies

  October 17, 2011 Alex Woodie

  UNICOM Systems made two separate acquisition deals last month, including the purchase of iET Solutions, a developer of IT service management software (ITSM) aimed at helping companies achieve ITIL compliance, and illustro Systems International, a developer of mainframe utilities for z/OS and z/VSE shops. In early September, Mission Hills, California-based UNICOM bought illustro, a Dallas, Texas-based company that develops a range of software primarily aimed at IBM System z mainframe community, including z/OS and z/VSE shops. The company’s flagship product is a Web-enablement suite called z/Ware that transforms the 3270 datastream into XML and HTML. The company also

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• Connectria Customers Pleased with Hosted Services

  October 17, 2011 Dan Burger

  No matter if you call them hosted services, managed services, or cloud services, the common denominator is services. Can a hosted services company provide service at a level that meets extremely high expectations? Inquiring minds want to know. A simple “trust me” doesn’t close the deal. So to make sure customers are satisfied, a hosted survey provider checks in frequently with its customers. A customer satisfaction survey comes in handy in determining what’s right and what’s wrong. Apparently, Connectria is keeping its eye on its customers like a cat watching a mouse hole. Last week, the company sent out

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• IBM Offers Rebates On CBU Edition-PowerHA Combo

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM wants to sell the Capacity BackUp Editions on its earlier generation Power7-based servers–the ones not announced last week–and it is willing to give some instance cash rebates to customers to help grease the palms a little. In announcement letter 311-148, the IBM i Capacity BackUp with PowerHA offering is giving customers who buy a Power 720, 740, 750, 770, 780, or 795 CBU Edition machine and a license for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i Standard Edition rebates. Those buying the Power 720, 740, and 750 get $1,500 back, those buying the Power 770 and 780 get $2,000, and

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• Slow But Steady Growth for Data Centers Through 2015

  October 17, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  Once again, in contrast to the current economy in the U.S. at least, the analysts at Gartner are predicting an increase in worldwide data center hardware spending, projecting a total of $98.9 billion in 2011, which is up 12.7 percent from 2010 spending of $87.8 billion. The Gartner gurus go on to forecast that data center hardware spending will reach $106.4 billion in 2012, and surpass $126.2 billion in 2015. Even though Gartner’s finest are saying growth will continue in the world’s data centers through 2015, it looks like it will see a slowdown after the spike in 2011. A

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• IBM Promotes Easy SSD Tiering With DS8000 Deal

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hierarchical storage management is not a new concept, but it sure does keep getting new names as the years roll by. IBM‘s high-end DS8800 disk arrays, announced a year ago, sport a hierarchical storage management feature called Easy Tier, which was used to move frequently used data from slower disks to faster ones in the array automatically to boost overall system throughput. The DS8800, and other IBM systems and disk arrays as well, now sport solid state drives (SSDs) as well as disk drives, and IBM wants customers to take SSDs for a spin (er, well, not really I

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• SAP Software Sales Spike 28 Percent In Q3

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application software giant SAP is rolling in it again, just like rival Oracle has been since the Great Recession ended. The “it” I am referring to is not legal issues, but rather money. And SAP has so much of it now it decided to release preliminary results for the third quarter ended in September. In the quarter, SAP posted at 28 percent increase in software sales, to €841 million, and software and software-related services sales (is that a German language construct or what?) posted a 16 percent increase to €2.69 billion. Total revenues rose by 14 percent to €3.41

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• Add Outfile Support to Your Applications

  October 12, 2011 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. When I compare IBM i to other operating systems, I am amazed. This well-designed, well-built operating system has numerous features that are foreign concepts to other operating systems. One of those features is that of “outfiles”, files that are built by display-type and work-type commands. If you haven’t done so, consider that it may be advantageous to write your own commands with outfile support. In general, programs that write to database files always write to certain database files, and that’s as it should be. A file maintenance program

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• Skipping Robot/SCHEDULE Runs on AS/400-Class Machines

  October 12, 2011 Hey, Joe

  On our System i 550, we use Robot/SCHEDULE for batch processing. Every so often, we have a programming issue where we have to skip running a job in the middle of a long job stream. The skipped job sometimes has reactive jobs hanging off it. We still want to run the reactive jobs, even when we don’t run their prerequisite job. Got any ideas? –Keith Like many other shops, we also use Robot/SCHEDULE for running batch job streams on our System i and Power i machines. Like you, we’ve encountered the same issue where we want to skip running one

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• GXS Shares Development Plans for IBM i Customers

  October 11, 2011 Alex Woodie

  It’s been nearly two years since GXS acquired Inovis, which had inherited the Harbinger and Peregrine brands that were so familiar to AS/400 shops of old. GXS still has about 2,000 EDI customers running on today’s IBM i platform, and while they represent just a small part of GXS’ $420 million business, the company has big plans for helping its IBM i customers take advantage of GXS’ cloud services, as well as its managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities. GXS’ IBM i-based EDI translator, called TrustedLink IBM i edition (TLi), is an elder statesman in the software world, with 25 years

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