• QlikTech’s New iPad Client Ain’t No ‘Dumb Pad’

  April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  QlikTech began delivery of a new iPad interface that turns the popular Apple device into a truly interactive client for working with QlikView business intelligence applications. The new product represents a big improvement over the static “dumb pads” that characterized first-generation attempts to build BI clients for the iPad, a QlikTech executive says. “First-generation iPad BI apps turn iPads into ‘dumb pads’,” says Anthony Deighton, QlikTech senior vice president of products for the Radnor, Pennsylvania-based BI software company. “They may have good-looking visuals, but their limited views, predefined paths, pre-canned reports, and lack of up-to-date data mean they aren’t always

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• OAR Gives looksoftware Customer Technological Freedom

  April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The Australian clothing retailer Stafford has gone live with looksoftware‘s Open Access, RPG Edition (OAR) handler offering, the software company announced last week. According to Stafford’s IT manager, the OAR software will make it much easier for the company to adopt new e-commerce channels in the future, without being hindered by the limitations of 5250. Stafford wishes it had adopted lookserver for Open Access a little sooner than it had. That’s because the JD Edwards World shop spent a good deal of time and money creating a special version of its online order processing application that was optimized for

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• HP Launches Cloud Transformation Solutions

  April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Hewlett-Packard doesn’t usually come to mind as a go-to provider of solutions for IBM i customers–unless they’re thinking of moving off the platform. But the company says its newly released tools for helping customers transform to cloud computing is applicable to legacy RPG programs, just as it is to the large global supply of aged COBOL and PL/1 software. When embarking upon an initiative to modernize IT systems using the cloud, it’s important not to go into it with a pre-determined point of view, says Paul Evans, the worldwide lead for application transformation solutions in HP’s enterprise computing division. For

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• Spinnaker Says JD Edwards Support Business Growing Fast

  April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Spinnaker Support, a provider of third-party maintenance and support services, doubled the number of JD Edwards shops it does business with last year and expects the pace of growth to continue this year, the company announced at the recent Oracle user conference. Denver, Colorado-based Spinnaker Support provides consulting and third-party support services to companies running the JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne ERP systems that are now owned by Oracle. Like several other third-party support providers, Spinnaker Support has capitalized on the high cost of Oracle maintenance agreements, which is typically equal to an annual payment of 22 percent of

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• Jamaica Port Authority Revs IT Systems to Handle More Traffic

  April 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) recently signed new multi-year contract to upgrade its computer systems to handle an expected increase in ship traffic in the coming years. The contracts, which are worth about $3 million over three years, include an IBM i-based container terminal control system from the Belgium company Cosmos and a new financial reporting system from California-based Oracle. The PAJ is upgrading its computer systems to handle an expected increase in traffic as a result of the ongoing widening of the Panama Canal, according to an article in Sunday’s issue of the Jamaica Gleaner. (Here’s

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• That Faster Power 750 Motor Is Made for IBM i Shops

  April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you pay for your operating system on a per-core basis, not a per socket basis, and that operating system includes a relational database and costs as much as Big Blue charges for the IBM i platform, there is one thing I can tell you for sure: you want the fastest processor that IBM can ship, and you don’t want to pay for extra cores you will never need, to get the best bang for the buck. And lucky for OS/400 and i shops, IBM has added just such a processor to the Power 750 midrange machine. As The Four

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• All Kinds of Goodies Added to IBM i 7.1

  April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s no secret that I like hardware, but I am the first to admit that the endless progression of hardware improvements is merely there to make software run better, faster, or more reliably. The hardware is the easy part; the software is the hard part and it therefore moves a lot more slowly on the evolutionary scale than hardware. That said, companies like to roll out new software releases with new hardware releases to give customers twice as many reasons to think about spending some money. And so it was with the Power Systems announcements on April 12. As The

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• Power Systems Sales Jump 19 Percent in Q1

  April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems business is finally hitting on all five cylinders: blade servers, entry servers, midrange servers, enterprise servers, and the big bad box. It took IBM the better part of a year to get the entire Power7-based server lineup into the field, and the first quarter of 2011 was the first financial period when all of the new iron was available and, perhaps more importantly, when customers thought business conditions had stabilized enough for them to actually spend money. In the first quarter ended in March, IBM posted revenues of $24.6 billion, an increase of 7.7 percent over the

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• As I See It: ‘He Kindly Stopped for Me’

  April 25, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Richard was at work when his wife died. Although it was a Saturday, he was hunched over a keyboard, stringing together lines of code that would become a customized inventory control system. He had hoped to join his wife and some friends for a bike ride, but the project was late, the client was impatient, and Richard prided himself on being conscientious. When his phone rang, the caller ID said it was his wife, but the voice on the other end was male and the tone was grave. Afterward, he could not recall all of what the man said, just

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• Power Systems Get Some I/O and Storage Enhancements

  April 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A fair argument can be made that innovation is progressing faster and is much more keenly needed in the storage arena than in processors and other elements of a system–with the possible exception of main memory technology, which is woefully lagging processor and flash/disk storage innovation. As part of the Power Systems blade and midrange systems update two weeks ago, IBM rolled out a bunch of subtle enhancements to the storage it sells with the Power-based server line. Disk drives have not been replaced completely by flash memory, and given the relatively low cost of storage capacity, they won’t

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