• MCS Buys Barsa Distribution Systems

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maximum Computer Systems has announced that it has acquired the Power Systems and System x server and application and systems software distribution business of Barsa Consulting. Barsa Consulting is, of course, the Purchase, New York, AS/400 consulting and distribution business founded by Al Barsa, who passed away in April 2008 while at the COMMON midrange trade show. Since that time, Barsa Consulting has continued to operate, with Al’s wife, Sue Barsa, serving as president. Being a privately held company, Barsa Consulting was pretty quiet about its own business, but in a statement put out by MCS, which has acquired

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• Big Blue Pushes for Patent Law Reforms

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in August 2006, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Intellectual Property Subcommittee, proposed a sweeping and supposedly bipartisan patent reform bill. And this past April, after years of wrangling by industry giants and their lobbyists, that bill was voted on by the committee and approved by a vote of 15 to 4. And now it is stalled in the Senate, and last week IBM tried to kick start it again. The original Senate bill, S1145, which you can read about

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• IBM’s Server GM Caught in Insider Trading Net

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You can really tell who hasn’t watched The Wire. You just can’t use communication technology if you want to get away with a crime, and you really can’t trust anyone. The problem is, technology becomes invisible, and sometimes people forget they are using it. This is one of the reasons why Bob Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, has been caught up in a stunning insider trading scandal centered around one hedge fund and another equity fund. He was implicated through the use of wiretaps as part of an FBI investigation.

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• Rocket Software Raises $91.9 Million Through Equity Sale

  October 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like Rocket Software is building up a war chest to do more acquisitions. According to a filing last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Rocket Software sold a $91.9 million equity stake into itself. And according to the filing, Rocket Software is saying that under rule 506 of the SEC rules, it does not have to disclose who it sold equity to. This rule allows a company to issue securities with no upper limit in their value to up to 35 “unsophisticated investors” plus an unlimited number of “accredited investors.” (What a strange rule. Do whatever you

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• Gartner Ranks the Managed File Transfer Products

  October 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Organizations looking to buy and implement a managed file transfer (MFT) product to drive better security and governance of file transfer activities may want to consult the recent Gartner report on the product category. In its September Magic Quadrant, the analyst group sliced and diced nearly four dozen vendors and their MFT offerings. As expected, the vendors that Gartner considers leaders, including Axway and Proginet, touted their place in the rankings. MFT refers to a relatively new class of products that are designed to manage, secure, centralize, and automate the transfer of files inside and outside of an organization.

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• Getting the Message, Part 1

  October 14, 2009 Paul Tuohy

  When we look at modernizing (or writing new) applications, one of the basic principles is to tier the application, i.e., separate the interface, the business logic, and the database processing. The concept is that any of the components can be changed without affecting the others and, more importantly, you can have multiple interfaces making use of the same business logic and database routines. That’s all well and good, but there are a couple of minor hiccups that have to be handled. What happens when a business logic or database routine hits an error? How does it notify the interface that

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• How Do I Find What’s Not There?

  October 14, 2009 Hey, Ted

  Our inventory items are assigned seven-digit numbers. When we accept an order for a custom product, we assign it a number, build the product, ship it, and retire the number. After a few years, the system automatically purges these numbers, which means we are free to reuse these numbers. Is there a way to make an SQL query find the numbers within a range that are not assigned to items? –Tim I’ll give you a method that works at V5R4 or above, Tim. Let’s say your database file is IBM‘s famous QIWS/QCUSTCDT, and that you want to find available

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• Admin Alert: Locking Down i5/OS System Security Values

  October 14, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  This week, I’m demonstrating a technique for protecting your system security setup from unauthorized changes by other i5/OS administrative users. Introduced in i5/OS V5R2 and located inside System Service Tools (SST), there is an operating system configuration that lets you lock down security settings so that no users can change your preset i5/OS security scheme. Here’s how it works. Why Lock Down Security Changes? The main reason for shutting down your security scheme is for. . . well, security. Your iSeries, System i, or Power i box may reside in a regulated environment where only one or two security officer

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• Cloud Storage Services Make their Way to the i OS Midrange

  October 13, 2009 Alex Woodie

  A pair of new cloud storage services that work with i OS data were announced last week by Kisco Information Systems and IBM. Kisco’s new offering, called i2S3, is tailor made for System i environments, and utilizes Amazon‘s S3 storage cloud offering to store i OS backups. Meanwhile, IBM’s new offering, called the Smart Business Storage Cloud, supports a variety of file systems, and would require System i shops to have implemented an XIV disk array. Kisco’s new i2S3 is aimed at making it inexpensive and easy for a System i shop to get started with a storage

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• MKS Adds Test Management to ALM Suite

  October 13, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IT organizations that use MKS‘ application lifecycle management (ALM) software can now count on the vendor to handle one more aspect of their day-to-day business: test case management. With the recent releases of MKS Integrity 2009, the Waterloo, Ontario, company has delivered a framework that makes software testing–including setting test criteria and storing test results–just another part of an overall ALM strategy. The way MKS iSeries product manager Marty Acks sees it, there are certain tasks and procedures that IT personnel do that belong on something he calls the “ALM bus.” When a bug is reported and a request

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