• : A Community of Common Interest

  June 22, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  TFH Flashback Editor’s Note: This is the first-page essay from the pilot edition of The Four Hundred, which was written by Hesh Wiener, my mentor and the original publisher of the newsletter. The first edition of The Four Hundred was published nine months after the launch of the AS/400 in June 1988, and was a joint production between Technology News of America, Hesh’s company and my employer way back then, and the Reed Elsevier publishing giant. The newsletter actually got its start in England first and was rolled out in the United States and Canada a few months

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• IDC Forecasts Server Sales Declines Until 2011; Blame X64 Boxes

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In normal times, the server market is a leading indicator of sorts for the economy. But we do not live in normal times, either with respect to the global economy in general or to the server space in particular. The economy has been on the rocks since late 2007, and the economic meltdown last summer certainly has put a damper on IT spending, especially at large enterprises. But a far greater problem, in terms of server revenues, might be the mainstreaming of virtualization and the advent of cloud computing, both of which allow companies to support growing workloads with a

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• Big Blue Offers U.S. Companies U.S.-Only Support

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Nationalism creeps into the computer business from funny angles. Who made the processors, memory, and disk drives in computers used to matter back in the 1970s and 1980s, and then when we moved to more global manufacturing in the 1990s, the name on the label of the machine and where the sales office was seemed to matter more, with the possible exception of supercomputing, where national security issues hold sway. With so much of the tech support now outsourced to India, and unemployment running high, support is now a hot button politically, and we all know how Big Blue doesn’t

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• IBM Office Suite Takes a Whack at Microsoft Licensing Albatross

  June 22, 2009 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s Lotus Symphony has been a shiny new car with not enough gas in the tank. Built to be effective–and very cost effective–but missing a key ingredient. Things have changed. And anyone who is angry as hell and doesn’t want to pay the licensing fees for Microsoft Office should be happy this day has arrived. It’s been a year since IBM introduced its free office productivity software called Lotus Symphony. The ensuing reaction was mild excitement after discovering what it could do, but more like a murmur after discovering what it could not do. The most glaring deficiency was

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• Custom Tailored Solutions for the Crisis Prone

  June 22, 2009 Dan Burger

  Industry leaders like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle are not what you would call vertically challenged. Their sales and marketing strategies are big on vertical industries, and they make the most of selling hardware, software, and services that are customized for specific congregations based on similar business intentions and geographies. You might remember a few years ago when IBM introduced the Vertical Industry Program to its System i independent software vendor community. VIP was designed to solve precise customer needs by teaming software vendors, resellers, and system integration experts in a plan aimed at improving integration and implementation–two open

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• V6R1 Run SQL Scripts: Saving Scripts to a System i Source File

  June 17, 2009 Skip Marchesani

  V6R1 brings some nice enhancements to Run SQL Scripts—which is part of the Database function in System i Navigator–that provide more function and make it easier to use. One of these V6R1 enhancements is the ability to save, and retrieve or open an SQL script to/from a System i source file, in addition to saving it to a PC or a stream file. The following example shows an SQL script called “custmstr3” that was originally saved as a PC file, and which will now be saved as a System i source file. The first step is to click on File

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• A Testing Tip

  June 17, 2009 Ted Holt

  One of the annoyances of maintenance programming is that testing a program change often takes longer–even several times longer–than the process of making the change. One impediment to testing is the inordinate amount of time required to load a test database with the data appropriate for a good test. In the following paragraphs, I share a simple tip that in some situations reduces the effort to establish a good test environment. Many shops maintain a separate system (either another computer or a logical partition of the machine that houses their production system) for program testing. This testing system may contain

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• Admin Alert: A Simple Save While Active Backup Program

  June 17, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  The problem with 24×7 environments is that it’s difficult to make time to run complete system backups. Modern processing needs dictate that you can rarely, if ever, take down your machine to back up the entire system. This week, I’ll look at a hybrid backup scheme that lets you achieve the dual goal of performing occasional full system backups while still saving all your critical system and user data. A Simple Strategy The following is a simple save strategy that you may be able to use in your shop. It consists of two system backup elements that allow you to

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• Crossroads Pushing VTL Solution to System i Customers

  June 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  There is a resurgence of interest in delivering virtual tape library (VTL) solutions to System i shops, and one of the companies driving that resurgence is Crossroads Systems. Crossroads develops and sells a VTL appliance called the Virtual TapeServer (VTS) that offers close integration with the IBM i OS server (Power Systems). An OEM to tier-one storage providers for many years, the Austin, Texas, firm is now counting on the VTS to help drive its new sales strategy. Crossroads has a long history in the enterprise storage market. Much of its business has been based around its core technology,

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• IBI Updates WebFOCUS BI Platform

  June 16, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Information Builders (IBI) unveiled a new release of WebFOCUS last week at its annual user conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The vendor says it has included more than 100 new features in the release, including a new predictive analytics and data mining module called RStat, and the capability to view activity such as cash register transactions in real time through a new module called Activity Monitor. This release also brought enhancements to the InfoAssist ad hoc reporting tool, and the Active PDF navigation tool. WebFOCUS is a mature, Java-based business intelligence platform that runs natively on the IBM i OS (i5/OS)

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