• IT Competitiveness Index Shifts, but U.S. Remains on Top

  September 28, 2009 Dan Burger

  Competitiveness in the global marketplace is a topic that gets pummeled like the loser of a full contact fighting match. And conversations about global competitiveness almost require talking about information technology. The link between key factors such as productivity and financial sophistication–across the business spectrum regardless of specific industry or size of the operation–and IT is a strong one. The United States sits on top of the world by providing the most competitive conditions for information technology, and that statement is backed up by the IT Industry Competitiveness Index, an annual ranking that assesses and compares the IT industry environments

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• Storage Software Doing Better Than Hardware, Says IDC

  September 28, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past few weeks, The Four Hundred has told you about how challenging the server and disk storage markets have been for both customers and vendors. But there are pockets where IT sales have not been hit so hard, and one of them is the add-on software for storage arrays that bring data replication, snapshotting, and myriad other capabilities to storage systems. According to a report from IDC, such storage software sales only declined by 9.8 percent, to $2.84 billion worldwide in the second quarter. This is quite a bit rosier–and a lot more profitable–than the 18.7 percent

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• Zend, IBM, and Microsoft Shoot for the Clouds with PHP

  September 28, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the PHP programming language is to live on in clouds as well as data centers, applications written in PHP are going to have to be able to flow not only between data centers and their internal server stacks (we are apparently calling these private clouds these days) and external utility computing providers (these are now called public or semi-private clouds), but also around different clouds. To that end, last week Zend Technologies, the commercial entity behind the open source PHP language and runtime environment, teamed up with IBM, Microsoft, and a couple of cloud providers to

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• WDSC vs. RDi

  September 23, 2009 Susan Gantner

  It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of RSE (Remote System Explorer). When I’m talking to developers who still use SEU to edit their source code, I always nag them to give RSE a try. Assuming I manage to convince them to take a look at it, usually the next topic of discussion relates to whether that means they should load the RSE that’s in WDSC or the version that’s in RDi. First, some background for any of you out there who may not be aware of what the quandary is about. RSE first appeared as one part WDSC

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• Let’s Start Over from the Beginning

  September 23, 2009 Hey, Ted

  We have RPG programs that use SQL cursors to sequentially retrieve data. If a program cancels and I call it again, the program resumes processing a cursor where it left off. I have to sign off and back on in order to restart from the top. Why doesn’t the program start over from the beginning of the returned data set? –Lynne The behavior you’re witnessing comes from three contributing factors, Lynne. First, your program was compiled to close the cursor when the activation group is destroyed. Second, your program is running in the default activation group. Third, you are not

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• The Cost of Not Backing Up

  September 23, 2009 Hey, Joe

  I’m performing a disaster recovery review for a client. The client backs up only i5/OS user libraries daily. He doesn’t back up program libraries, QUSRSYS, QGPL, or QSYS2. He doesn’t process the SAVSECDTA, SAVCFG, SAVDLO, or SAV commands daily or weekly, either. He’s adamant that he has enough libraries to perform a successful system recovery. And it gets worse. . . . The user only does a complete system save if he loads cumulative PTFs or does a hardware upgrade. He didn’t perform a complete system save before the last hardware upgrade, and he used an old tape to perform

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• IBM Targets Mid Market with Cognos Express

  September 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IBM yesterday showed it’s serious about competing in the mid market business intelligence space with the launch of Cognos Express, a collection of analytics, reporting, and budgeting tools for groups of 100 users or less. With its in-memory OLAP capability, streamlined implementation, and Web- and Excel-based interfaces, the $12,500 offering can be used without much help from IT staffs, which will put it up against the likes of in-memory BI leader QlikTech. IBM’s Cognos group has been working on Cognos Express since Big Blue bought the BI software vendor more than two years ago, says Ben Plummer, director of

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• 3B Aims to Break Barriers with its ‘unERP’

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  3B Dataservices, an IBM business partner in Eastern Canada, is stirring up the ERP pot these days by claiming that its software for enterprise application for small and mid size businesses in the light manufacturing, distribution, and construction industries, called iNfinite Answers, is the world’s first “unERP” application. So what makes an unERP? According to the folks at 3B Dataservices, it’s all about radically simplifying the database design. According to Rob Bunn, a principle at 3B Dataservices, the company started designing the framework for iNfinite Answers more than 15 years ago with the goal of eliminating elements that traditionally

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• Redesigned Reporting Infrastructure Pays Off in Inventory Reduction

  September 22, 2009 Robert Gast

  Plodding through lengthy printed reports to find specific performance metrics is a leading cause of frustration in many of today’s IBM System i-based business environments. Thumbing through a five-pound green-bar paper report to find bits and pieces of data based on day-old information is the equivalent of walking behind a mule to plow your field. A reporting system based on dashboards created for specific management-level users featuring information updated and displayed every five seconds is not only possible, it’s affordable. Key City Furniture manufactures build-to-order products that are sold through hundreds of retail furniture outlets. With more than 150 employees

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• Bug Busters Fine-Tunes Budget-Minded HA Offering

  September 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  What can you expect to get with an i OS high availability software offering that costs between $10,000 and $15,000? With last week’s release of Bug Busters Software Engineering‘s Remote Software Facility-HA, you can expect to find new features like a source-to-target compare feature, new archive and refresh functions, and a check-point reset feature for restarting interrupted role swaps. These come on top of core HA features that are leading some System i shops to consider RSF-HA for their HA and DR needs. Bug Busters has been continually adding new features to RSF-HA over the past three years since

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