• Reader Feedback on IBM Smart Business Moves into Italy

  November 30, 2009 Dan Burger

  If you want to get the juices flowing, just talk about how one might revive the Power Systems i platform. In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we did a story on how IBM was expanding its Smart Cube i appliance into Italy and growing its Smart Business application portfolio in the United States and India. (See this link for that story.) Here’s what one reader had to say: I quote: “When you look at what the application-centric approach did for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i, and you bring the attributes into the context of a solution,

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• IBM Pushes Smarter Mid-Market IT Projects with More Financing

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last year, IBM started offering enhanced financing deals to IT shops in the United States who would be bold and buy gear even though the global economy was on the skids so they could take advantage of an accelerated depreciation scheme set up by the Bush administration and extended by the Obama team. In June, the company said it was allocating $5 billion in funding to chase “smarter infrastructure” projects around the globe, which generally have an IT component. Now, IBM is aiming some financing deals at mid-market shops and expanding the financing it is offering to cover more regions

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• SaaS Sales Up Smartly Despite (or Because Of) the Economy

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying applications and raw infrastructure as a service is getting a push globally thanks to the maturation of software and networking technologies (particularly improved Web interfaces and low-cost, high-speed Internet access) and a pull from companies who are trying to cut costs and only pay for what they use. According to a recent report from Gartner, the company’s market wizards expect that global software as a service (SaaS) sales will grow by 17.7 percent this year, to $7.5 billion. This market is a lot more than just Salesforce.com. “The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within

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• Math, Science, and Engineering: A Better Career These Days?

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Researchers at Rutgers University and Georgetown University have just completed a major longitudinal study of how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students move from high schools to the high tech labor force. And guess what? The number of students graduating from American colleges and universities with STEM degrees is not a problem. Getting STEM students to stay in STEM careers is, however. The report, called Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students through the Science and Engineering Pipeline, was put together by Lindsay Lowell, director of public policy studies at Georgetown, and Hal Salzman, professor of public

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• AMD Taps IBM Chiphead for Board of Directors

  November 30, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Nick Donofrio, who retired last year after spending 44 years as a chip and technology guru at IBM, has been appointed to the board of directors of X64 chip maker Advanced Micro Devices. Donofrio got his start at Big Blue as a logic and memory chip designer, and has run a number of divisions at the company, including its Unix server businesses when they came to market in 1990 and its mainframe business when it was being revitalized in the early 2000s. Before Donofrio retired last May, he had risen to the position of executive vice president

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• File Caching in RSE

  November 18, 2009 Jon Paris

  Two of my favorite features of RSE are the Outline View and the Program Verifier. One thing they both have in common is the fact that they use cached descriptions of any required externally described files. These cached descriptions are retrieved once and then stored in the RSE workspace for fast retrieval when required to refresh the Outline View or when Verifying the code in the editor. Because both these features rely on those cached descriptions, they also have something else in common; when a file’s external description changes, neither of them will automatically catch on to that fact. Therefore

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• Message Received, But Not Understood

  November 18, 2009 Hey, Ted

  I had a problem last week. I was monitoring for error messages after an Add Physical File Member (ADDPFM) command in a CL program. Well, OS/400 sent two CPF messages when ADDPFM failed. MONMSG would only trap the second message, but I wanted to trap the first one because that’s the one that tells me what went wrong. What do I need to do? –Chris This seems like a good time to review some messaging fundamentals. Chris is not a newbie programmer, so if he doesn’t understand, there are probably others who don’t understand either. When a CL command fails,

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• More with the WDSc Tasks View

  November 18, 2009 Hey, Bruce

  Your article of 01/01/05 says you can add tasks to a source member or to specific lines in a source member. In 7.0.0.6, I’m able to do the latter but not the former. Can you point me in the right direction? –RJS I haven’t switched to V7 of WDSc yet, but if things are the similar to what they are in V6, then the following should work: You must be using iSeries Projects perspective and have created a project for your source. Select (single-click) the source member that you want to add a task for. In the Tasks View, there

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• Security Vendors Take Aim at HITECH Act for Healthcare IT Overhaul

  November 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  While our representatives in Congress hash out healthcare reform, the executive branch of the government is already moving forward with aggressive new regulations aimed at ensuring the security of electronic medical health records and healthcare information systems. Whatever changes Washington imposes upon the healthcare industry, existing laws like the HITECH Act, a recently strengthened HIPAA, and the Red Flag Rules have put into motion a massive overhaul of healthcare IT systems–and the healthcare industry is woefully unprepared to deal with it. The HITECH Act (officially the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) was part of President Obama’s

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• Raz-Lee Adds Object-Level Security to i OS Security Suite

  November 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security last week announced two new security modules for its i OS security suite. Native Object Security will allow i OS shops to implement object-level security on their systems without the hassle of manually configuring it through the operating system, while User Profile and System Value Replication will allow shops to easily replicate security settings across multiple servers or LPARs. The Israeli software company also made changes to other modules of its iSecurity suite, including its anti-virus software. iSecurity is a collection of about 17 products designed to automate the configuration and management of i OS servers, ranging from

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