• Write-Downs Hammer Agilysys Financials in Fiscal Q4

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application software developer and hardware reseller Agilysys is trying to steer its enterprise in the same choppy economic seas as the rest of us, and despite an uptick in sales for its key InfoGenesis product, the company still was unable to stay in the black in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 ended in March. For the quarter, which spanned the worst part of the economic meltdown and the consequent slamming down of IT spending, sales of hardware and software by Agilysys, which is a key peddler of Power Systems i products, fell by 27.1 percent to $118.2 million. However,

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• Arrow Revises Its Fiscal Q2 Outlook Downward

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the economy is booming, distributing electronic components and IT products can be a good, if challenging, business. But the economic downturn is still putting a damper on IT spending, and that has compelled master distributor Arrow Electronics to revise its expectations for its fiscal second quarter ending July 4 downward. As The Four Hundred reported two weeks ago, both Arrow and its main rival in IT distribution, Avnet, managed to do as well as could be expected considering the steep drop off in server spending since last summer. While the economy in the United States is showing

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• Dataram Pushes Entry and Midrange Power System Memory

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of its acquisition of Micro Memory Bank, a maker of memory modules for various servers including IBM‘s Power Systems and predecessor System i and System p servers, Dataram is ramping up its marketing efforts to sell memory modules to cash-conserving shops that want to move to Power6 iron or add some memory to existing machines to boost performance. As most of you know, virtualized servers are more times than not memory or I/O bound, not CPU bound, and machines supporting online transaction processing workloads as well as a bunch of other infrastructure apps (as i platforms

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• Big Blue Names Eight New IBM Fellows

  June 8, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM last week announced eight new elite researchers who have been given the elite designation IBM Fellow. A number of them have worked on the technologies underpinning the systems you are currently using or most likely will at some point in the near future. Perhaps the most significant new fellow is Hung Le, who works as a chip designer in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, specifically at its Austin, Texas, Power Systems labs. Le has had a hand in a lot of different System z and Power processor designs, starting with the Power3 chip that was announced for IBM’s RS/6000

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• RPG Beans from VB Apps

  June 3, 2009 Hey Mike

  Recently we implemented the use of RPG beans on the iSeries. Some of us like it, some of us hate it. I think it’s great because I have some exposure to C# and Java. We also benchmarked it for performance and didn’t find any problems in the iSeries side. We are planning on instantiating the RPG beans from VB apps. Do you know if there are any performance issues from instantiating the RPG beans from a VB application? Do you know if someone has done any research related to this topic? –Frank Hi Frank, You pose two very good questions:

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• Changing the Library List for Run SQL Scripts

  June 3, 2009 Skip Marchesani

  The Run SQL Scripts function–a.k.a. the SQL Script Center or Script Center–is an easy-to-use option in System i Navigator that allows you to interactively create and execute one or more SQL statements and/or batch CL commands. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is: How do I access or find my tables and views using the Script Center? Accessing Tables and Views There are two options for finding or accessing your tables, views, and other database objects from the Script Center. One option is to qualify the object name with the library name in your SQL statement or

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• Admin Alert: Beyond Replication in an i5/OS High-Availability Environment

  June 3, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  One company I deal with has two different high-availability setups that mimic production partitions for its main systems. They’ve been running this configuration for two years, and it’s amazing how many high availability issues occur that have little or nothing to do with basic replication. This week, I’ll look beyond basic replication in building a Capacity BackUp (CBU) system and how these issues can affect failover processing. The CBU in One Paragraph A CBU is a specially configured iSeries/System i/Power i machine that communicates with your main production partition to replicate production data and applications by using high availability software

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• OpenSpan Aims to Bring Mainframe Qualities to Desktop Integration

  June 2, 2009 Alex Woodie

  For all the flack that green-screen applications get for being difficult to use, powerful macro tools and well-defined APIs make it relatively easy to access mainframe processes and data through 5250 and 3270 terminal emulators. But when the tables are turned and fat-client Windows apps are asked to open up and share, the DLLs and executables get cold feet. OpenSpan is trying to change that with an integration tool it claims can create on-demand APIs for any Windows app, and include them in cross-platform business process automation projects. Francis Carden, who co-founded OpenSpan in 2005 with CTO Stephen Beckett and

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• DB2 Web Query Updates to Ship in August

  June 2, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The new DB2 Web Query enhancements–including an adapter that provides “occasional” access to the SQL Server database from the i OS business intelligence tool, and the capability to access and update DB2 Web Query reports from within Excel–won’t ship until August, IBM announced recently. The new capabilities were originally expected to be available by the end of June, back when the announcements were first made with Information Builders in February, but the timeline has apparently slipped. DB2 Web Query is a special version of Information Builders’ WebFOCUS software that IBM announced in 2007. The Java-based software enables users to write

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• Quadrant’s IntelliChief Gets Integration Hooks to JDA’s MMS

  June 2, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Retailers that rely on JDA Software Group‘s i OS-based Merchandise Management System (MMS) will have an easier time integrating the application with Quadrant Software‘s IntelliChief content management system and working to eliminate paper-based processes as a result of integration work between JDA and Quadrant, the companies announced last week. After working together on several IntelliChief implementations at MMS shops, JDA and Quadrant decided to form a strategic alliance, says Gary Langton, CEO and co-founder of Quadrant Software, which is based in Tampa, Florida. “It only made sense for the two companies to join forces and formalize that relationship

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