• Economic Meltdown Puts Pressure on Jack Henry

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the bellwethers of the financial services industry as well as the IBM midrange is Jack Henry and Associates. And as you might expect, the company’s third quarter of fiscal 2009 was not a particularly good one. But JHA did no worse than a lot of other software companies, and compared to some, it has managed to do better considering the downturn in the global economy in general and in the banking sector in particular. For the quarter ended March 31, JHA reported license sales declined by 31 percent to $12.7 million, and hardware sales (which includes Power

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• Performance Tuning and Automation Form a Potent Pair

  May 11, 2009 Dan Burger

  Despite a lot of talk to the contrary, performance puzzles do exist in a large percentage of IBM midrange shops. It makes no difference whether the servers are called AS/400s, iSeries, System i, or Power Systems i. That’s not a knock on the hardware or the people who manage it. But to think that all is well because “this box just sits in the corner and runs” is like expecting your car to run its best without any maintenance or tuning whatsoever. Some would say performance tuning and system automation costs more money than it saves. That’s debatable, but most

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• SAP Boots Business ByDesign SaaS Apps to 2010?

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, it looks like the glorious plan for SAP to take on the midrange market with a line of newly created online applications to be sold SaaS style is running into some speed bumps, if not some road blocks. SAP launched its Business ByDesign SaaS applications back in September 2007, and the company has been pushing the product out into the future in baby steps, saying repeatedly that it needed more work and that it wants to get the product right. In a report last week in PC World, of all places, Bill McDermott, president of SAP’s global

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• Treasury of New DB2 6.1 (V6R1) Features, Part 6: Miscellaneous Enhancements

  May 6, 2009 Michael Sansoterra

  As the saying goes “all good things must come to an end.” And alas, this is the last in my series of tips on improvements to DB2 for i in V6R1. This final tip will cover the hodgepodge of remaining notable features added since the V5R4 that haven’t been covered in the prior tips. Stick around because there is some good stuff in here. ALTER FUNCTION Statement V5R4 gave us the ALTER PROCEDURE statement and now, at long last, DB2 has the ALTER FUNCTION statement. Prior to 6.1, when a function needed a modification, developers were forced to drop and

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• Having Fun with Javascript

  May 6, 2009 Paul Tuohy

  Over the last couple of years I have spent a lot of time playing around with Web pages. You can see the results of my efforts at www.systemideveloper.com. One of the really fun parts of getting to grips with Web pages has been learning about some of the weird and wonderful things that can be done with Javascript. In this article, I want to share two of my favorite Javascript functions. Hopefully, you might find them useful or they might spark you on to something even better. Fighting the Spam Bots When I first set up the System i

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• What Happened to my i5/OS Crypto Access Provider?

  May 6, 2009 Hey, Joe

  My vendor wants me to install IBM licensed program 5722-AC3 (128-bit Cryptographic Access Provider). However, I can’t find that product in my i5/OS V5R4 partition. I could have sworn it was there before we upgraded from version V5R3. What happened to 5722-AC3? –Sam With i5/OS V5R4, IBM made some changes to the way it manages encryption. After a V5R4 upgrade, you will notice that the following IBM licensed program products (LPP) are no longer available on your system: 5722-AC3–Cryptographic Access Provider–In earlier versions, this was referred to as the 128-bit Cryptographic Access Provider, because there also used to be a

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• i OS System Screens Get Web-Enabled With ilook from looksoftware

  May 5, 2009 Alex Woodie

  One of the biggest criticisms IBM has weathered regarding its Power System i platform over the years is the lack of a native graphical user interface (GUI). Now, looksoftware is doing something about it with ilook, a new piece of freeware unveiled last week at COMMON that changes operating system screens to Web-based GUIs. The vendor also announced snap for BPCS, a new tool that integrates the popular i OS ERP system with Outlook and the iPhone. Normally, a third-party vendor wouldn’t try to mess around with operating system screens. Sure, you can add your own stuff to augment native

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• LANSA Helps i OS and .NET Apps Meet at Database Level

  May 5, 2009 Dan Burger

  Application development decisions sometimes come down to bias. That’s a fact. Other times it is a question of skills relating to the particular development task. Sometimes costs, servers, databases, platforms, and interfaces drive the decision. Having options is important and that is why LANSA has introduced a new solution called iFusion.net that combines IBM i and Microsoft technologies. Rather than converting native i applications, it puts the emphasis on building composite applications to gain interoperability. “We have been driven to this because it is the most common scenario we find with our customers,” says LANSA president Steve Gapp. “The System

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• Customer Feedback Drives New Release of Quadrant’s IntelliChief

  May 5, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its flagship IntelliChief document management and workflow product at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada. IntelliChief 2.5 brings a smattering of relatively minor enhancements, such as automatic document matching and performance metrics, which demonstrate that customers are using the product and giving Quadrant feedback on how to make it better. There are two main paths that product development can take. The first springs from the mind of a single creative individual who is eager to push the latest technologies into his product. This type of development often looks very advanced on

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• Aldon Introduces Version Control to Build and Release Management

  May 5, 2009 Dan Burger

  People are not robots (tell that to your manager) and application development teams are going to use whatever versioning tool they want. Distributed development environments have made sure of that. It’s a corresponding truth that application build and release processes are bit more complicated, but you’ve probably already noticed that. So have the product designers at Aldon, an application lifecycle management software company with a long history as an IBM i vendor. Aldon, last week at the COMMON 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition, introduced the availability of a new Build Release Management (BRM) product that allows development teams using

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