• Vision Solutions Promotes Two Flavors of Continuous Data Protection

  August 10, 2009 Dan Burger

  Although the number of IBM iSeries shops that run AIX, or backup AIX, in a partition on the iSeries is pretty much a speck on the map, a considerably larger number of iSeries shops share their data center space with significant AIX systems. Disaster recovery and high availability vendor Vision Solutions sees this mix on a regular basis. Although well-known on the i side, the company is looking for a similarly commanding position on the AIX side. Vision was able to gain its dominating status in the AS/400 market through a combination of product development and acquisitions of its key

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• As I See It: Daniel, Part One

  August 10, 2009 Victor Rozek

  Unless you’re a statistician or a baseball fan, statistics are boring. The numbers generated by the seizing economy and the ill-chosen efforts to resuscitate it, are sterile, too big to grasp, and void of back story. For the purpose of understanding, statistics are to experience what birth certificates are to giving birth. In other words, stripped of all consequence, there can be no understanding. William Greider, in his groundbreaking book Secrets of the Temple, an in-depth exploration of the workings of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged that each time the Board of Governors voted to increase interest rates, they understood

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• Avnet and Arrow: System Sales Might Have Hit Bottom

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The two key master distributors of IBM and other brands of servers and storage, Avnet and Arrow Electronics, reported their financial results for their most recent quarters, and both companies are hoping that the server market has finally hit bottom. Avnet closed out its fiscal 2009 year on June 27, and said that in the fourth quarter it saw a gut-wrenching 19.5 percent revenue decline across its combined Technology Solutions and Electronics Marketing groups, to $3.77 billion. In the Technology Solutions business, which is where servers and storage from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others are peddled

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• New Midrange User Group for Tennessee Valley

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a story you don’t hear every day: there is a new midrange user group opening up shop here in the United States. Having moved from the Washington, D.C., area down to the outskirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently, AS/400 evangelist Don Rima has decided that the region needed a user group of its own and has therefore started up the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group. Chattanooga is about halfway between Nashville and Atlanta, Georgia, the latter being a hotbed of System/3X and AS/400 software development for about as long as IBM has been in the systems business. The Atlanta

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• Amtrak Re-Ups Server Outsourcing Contract with Big Blue

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Helping make the trains run on time is something that midrange systems have a lot of experience with. Long before there were PC servers, midrange boxes were scattered along the routes of railroads, providing local processing capacity for ticketing and linking back to reservation systems, which as many times as not were running on mainframes. With IT budgets under pressure and the need to do even more complex stuff to help Amtrak run better, America’s national commuter railroad decided it was time to renew and extend its IT outsourcing contract with Big Blue. Amtrak announced a five-year deal that will,

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• Magic Software’s Revenue and Profits Decline in Q2

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application development tool and integration middleware provider Magic Software Enterprises has been able to wring some more profits out of its business even as the slowing economy makes it tough to do so. However, like so many other software companies these days, the profits are down from where they were a year ago despite plenty of belt tightening. In the quarter ended June 30, Magic Software posted sales of $13.6 million, down 15.2 percent from last year’s second quarter and down 1.3 percent from the first quarter, when it booked $13.8 million in sales worldwide. By cutting back on research

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• IT Shops Struggle to Control Personnel Costs

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to a new report out of Gartner, IT managers and chief information officers are having a tough time getting their arms wrapped around personnel costs in their shops. Gartner has just put its 2009 IT Market Compensation Study out, which is based on surveys it performed back in March at 325 IT organization in the United States, and some 66 percent of the respondents to the survey said that they did not have a formal IT workforce planning process that would “enable them to leverage opportunities presented by this downturn.” I don’t find that shocking. I am a

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• Who Has the Strongest IT Brands?

  August 10, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  AS/400 shops are, perhaps more than any other system community until Sun Microsystems is finally consumed by Oracle, are keenly aware of product branding and the effects of not using a brand well to identify the differentiating features of that product. Market research company Millard Brown Optimor, which specializes in branding and, interestingly, assigning values to brands, has just released its BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report, which you can see here. And it argues that rather than being just some silly naming, proper brands allow established companies to more easily and more cheaply enter

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• Designing DB2 for i Stored Procedures for Simulated Array Handling

  August 5, 2009 Hey, Mike

  I enjoyed your article on using .NET to access DB2 on the iSeries. I am trying to extend the functionality of our ERP software with VB.NET 2005/2008. The data is on the iSeries. I plan to use DB2 stored procedures for data retrieval. One of my main stumbling blocks is how to pass a variable number of parameters to a stored procedure. For instance, let’s say a project manager is responsible for 10 projects that have specific project numbers. He can query on one project, all 10 projects, or any variable number of projects. How does one design a stored

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• Using Free-Format Calcs with Cycle Programs

  August 5, 2009 Hey, Ted

  I use free-format calculations for new development and for existing cycle-less RPG programs. However, I have responsibility for some old programs that use the RPG cycle. Is it possible for me to use free-format calcs in those programs? –Bill Yes, Bill. In the detail calculations (calcs with no level indicator in columns 7 and 8), use the /FREE and /END-FREE directives as you normally would. In the following example, I have added free-format calcs that are to be executed at L1 detail time (before a new control group) and at detail time (for each input record). C L1 MOVE *ZERO

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