• IBM i Manifest Takes Root in Japan

  June 22, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Does today’s Power Systems server provide a viable and healthy platform on which companies should bet their business? Companies around the world have been asking themselves this question since the platform was born more than 30 years ago when the System/38 debuted. Now, a group of AS/400 vendors and customers in Japan, not content to rely on IBM to promote the platform, are taking matters into their own hands and promoting the platform themselves through a movement they call the IBM i Manifest. The roots of the IBM i Manifest, or iManifest, go back more than a year, when a

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• Help Wanted: AS/400 Advocate

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The iManifest coming out of a group of business partners is Japan, which you can read about elsewhere in this edition of The Four Hundred, has stirred up a lot of thought and talk in the AS/400 market (yes, I said it that way on purpose) concerning who is to be responsible for the safeguarding of the present and the future of the AS/400 platform. This is all healthy and good, but it doesn’t solve the central problem the AS/400 faces: It has no advocate inside of IBM. As we know all too well, IBM has made many, many

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• COMMON Europe: Doing the Math on Top i Concerns

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  COMMON Europe, the European affiliation of midrange user groups for i communities in various countries, has closed out its annual Top Concerns survey and has some initial results that it wants to share with readers of The Four Hundred. The Top Concerns survey ran from the beginning of April through the end of May and was designed to get a sense of the issues that i shops all over the world–not just in Europe–are concerned with in these trying days. For all of the readers of The Four Hundred who saw the solicitations to participate in the survey

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• : 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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