• LANSA Acquires aXes Products; Customers Likely Candidates for RAMP

  April 28, 2009 Dan Burger

  Two IBM i programmers can be given the same task and see the steps that need to be taken in entirely different ways. Add IT management, other departmental management, and executive management to a discussion about application development, application modernization, or application integration and the degree of difficulty shoots through the roof. You need options from simple refacing to more complex composite apps. That seems to be why LANSA acquired the intellectual property of the aXes suite of products from Arterial Software. The aXes product suite is a set of native IBM i software solutions that Webfaces existing 5250 business

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• i OS Spool Files Go In, Structured XML Comes Out

  April 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Symtrax this month announced the availability of a new product called Compleo for XML that’s designed to take spool files from i OS applications and convert them into structured XML documents that can be used elsewhere. The French company originally announced Compleo for XML last year, but it is just now being introduced to the North American market through Symtrax offices in Boston and Los Angeles. Compleo is a suite of output management tools that is well-established in the AS/400, iSeries, and System i community. The software has traditionally been used to convert spool files from IBM i, i5/OS, and

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• CCSS Cracks Down on Long-Running Jobs

  April 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  When System i batch jobs run longer than they’re supposed to, there can be serious consequences. Users may not be able to log in. Backups may not run. Industry regulations may not be followed. Last week, CCSS announced a new run time monitor in its i OS systems management tool, QSystem Monitor, that alerts administrators and operators to long-running jobs before they can cause these problems. According to CCSS, System i shops that use job scheduling software are the most susceptible to rouge jobs that run too long. The complexity of modern job schedulers means that jobs can run at

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• MySQL 5.4 Brings Scalability, Performance Improvements

  April 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Sun Microsystems took a moment last week, as it was getting prepared to be eaten by Oracle, to announce a new release of MySQL, the open source relational database management system it bought for $1 billion just over a year ago. MySQL 5.4 brings scalability enhancements for X64 and Chip Multi-threaded (CMT) servers, while general performance enhancements will help users running the software on all types of servers, including IBM Power Systems boxes. When paired with the InnoDB storage engine, which coincidentally is owned by Oracle, MySQL 5.4 can really scale. With InnoDB powering MySQL, Sun says, the duo

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• QlikTech Develops a BI Client for iPhone

  April 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  QlikTech last week announced QlikView for iPhone, a free piece of software that allows customers to access their QlikView business intelligence data on the go from the comfort of their Apple mobile phone. The software offers some nifty features, such as support for the iPhone’s integrated GPS receiver to create location-specific data, which QlikTech says gives it the edge over other mobile BI offerings, specifically Oracle‘s. QlikView for iPhone provides users with access to a series of reports, dashboards, KPIs, graphics, and other BI consumables from the iPhone. Like the standard QlikView interface, QlikTech’s iPhone interface gives users the

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• IBM Launches Power6+ Servers–Again

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Surprise, surprise, surprise. Attendees of the COMMON midrange conference and expo in Reno, Nevada, got a sneak preview of some announcements that IBM is making on Tuesday. As many of us had been expecting, the announcements–all part of a much larger Dynamic Infrastructure push by Big Blue–do indeed include Power6+ processors inside Power Systems iron. That’s not the surprise. But this is: these are not the first machines to use the Power6+ kickers to the Power6 chips. As it turns out, as I have come to discover, and as you almost certainly do not already know, some of the

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• Power Systems Down A Bit in IBM’s First Quarter

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM‘s Power Systems division, which sells what were formerly known as System i and System p servers and which are simply called Power Systems these days, was a relative bright spot among its various server lines in the company’s financial report for the first quarter of 2009. But even the popularity of IBM’s high-end Power boxes could not defy the same pressures that all of IBM’s other groups are feeling thanks to the economic meltdown. For the first quarter, IBM’s revenues fell across all of its major product groups–some more than others–and profits took a slight haircut, too. But,

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• COMMON Europe Opens Up Global i Top Concerns Survey

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 community has always been an international one, and in fact, for most of the 30 years that IBM has been selling midrange systems, the company did a lot more box shipments in Europe than it did in the United States. This made sense, given that Europe was not yet economically united and each country had its own businesses. Mergers around the world have given rise to a lot of consolidation of companies and their platforms, which has diluted the multinational feel of the i platform a bit. But just a bit. To get a feel for what i

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• Jilted Sun Snapped Up by Oracle for Application Systems

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, the drama between IBM and systems rival Sun Microsystems is over, now that database and application software giant Oracle is ponying up $5.6 billion in cash and debt to acquire Sun. Or, perhaps, it is just beginning, and perhaps Oracle has seen the light and will be creating a little something midrange folk know as the Application System, 400 Not Included, slash reserved for competitive battles in the marketplace. Sun’s private equity backers and frustrated Wall Street investors ran out of patience with Sun’s promises of eventual revenue growth and a return to profitability about the same time that

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• JDA Sales Hampered and Profits Slammed by Downturn in Q1

  April 27, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Retail and supply chain management application software maker JDA Software reported its financial results for the first quarter, and like just about every other IT vendor on the planet, JDA was hit by the economic downturn, which hurt sales a little and profits a lot. For the quarter ended in March, JDA says that it had revenues of $83.3 million, down 11.2 percent, more or less matching the revenue decline that IBM itself saw in the first quarter of this year. JDA’s software licenses in the quarter fell by a much more dramatic 23.5 percent to $15.3 million, but maintenance

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