• IBM Expands Power Systems-ISV Promotion

  April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hoping to scare up some business for its Power Systems platform and to get a little help from its independent software vendor partners, IBM last week extended a promotion on Power-based systems that has been running since March 2007 to cover more ISVs and more of their solutions. Under this Software Solutions for Power Systems Rebate Offering, which was originally aimed at the System p (AIX and Linux) part of the house but which was expanded last September to include the i 6.1 operating system and applications from ISVs who sell i-based software, IBM offers rebates that range from as

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• MaxAva Taps NSPI for Sales and Support in the U.S.

  April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software provider Maximum Availability is continuing its expansion into the North American Power Systems i space, and last week announced a partnership with Network Services Plus to help it sell and support its solutions in the United States. Maximum Availability is the Aukland, New Zealand, provider of the *noMAX suite of high availability and disaster recovery products for the i platform, which is used by hundreds of companies in over 40 countries. NSPI, which is based in the Roswell suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, has been around for 21 years and is a high-level partner with IBM, Microsoft

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• Logistics Provider Descartes Acquires Shipping Expert Scancode

  April 6, 2009 Dan Burger

  Descartes Systems Group–a global logistics solutions provider that specializes in hosted, transactional, and packaged solutions–has acquired privately held Scancode Systems, a developer and integrator of carrier-compliant parcel and less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping solutions. The acquisition brings additional services–as well as 500 new members–to the extensive Descartes Global Logistics Network. The acquisition is the latest in a series that Descartes has strung together as it strives to build out its suite of products and its hosted services. Here’s a review of the past 18 months. Beginning in August 2007, it acquired Global Freight Exchange, a U.K.-based company specializing in electronic

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• IBM Delays Small Form Factor Disks for the Power 550

  April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last October, when IBM did the final and full convergence of the i and p platforms into a single Power Systems lineup with a single set of product numbers, the company said that it would be putting 2.5-inch disk drives into the field for its midrange Power 550 servers. These disks were originally supposed to ship on November 21, then were pushed out to April 24. Now, they will be shipped on May 22. In its notice about the change in data for the 2.5-inch SAS drives for the Power 550, which you can read here, the company didn’t

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• A Sleepy RPG Program

  April 1, 2009 Hey, Ted

  Does RPG have anything equivalent to CL’s Delay Job (DLYJOB) command? I am working on an RF application, and I need to code a delay of a few seconds into my program. Besides using a do loop with a final value of 1,000,000,000,000, how can I cause a timed interval within an RPG program? –David Thanks to the wonders of the Integrated Language Environment, RPG has a way to delay a job a specific number of seconds. It’s called sleep. Sleep requires one 4-byte unsigned integer parameter–the number of seconds to delay–which must be passed by value. Here’s an example:

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• Treasury of new DB2 6.1 (V6R1) Features, Part 5: New Functions and Change Stamp Columns

  April 1, 2009 Michael Sansoterra

  Today’s tip addresses the new built-in functions available in DB2 for i (a.k.a. DB2 for i5/OS, SQL/400, and DB2 UDB for iSeries), change stamp columns and row change expressions. ASCII and CHR Functions The ASCII and CHR functions are great additions to DB2 for i. The ASCII function will take the left most character of a string expression and return the ASCII character code equivalent. Take the following example: Select ASCII(' ') From SysIBM/SysDummy1 This command will return a value of 32 (ASCII code for space) instead of the expected EBCDIC value of 64. The CHR (character) function behaves the

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• Admin Alert: Change Your Tape Drives, Change Your Tape Management Costs

  April 1, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  One shop I work with went through a tape drive revolution with two recent hardware purchases. They went from using several different tape drive formats to using one higher speed backup format for all locations. Here’s what they found out from the experience, and how a simple tape drive upgrade helped them lower their operational tape management costs. Before the Upgrade In late 2007, a mishmash of tape drive styles dominated this shop’s backup capabilities in the company’s data center. One System i 520 machine with two partitions (production and development) used two Ultrium LTO tape drives to back up

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• Lawson M3 Customers Get New B2B Option from Axway

  April 1, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Lawson M3 customers who are wondering how they are going to connect with trading partners on the other side of the globe were presented with a new B2B software option last week when Axway launched a pre-configured version of its flagship B2B product geared specifically to Lawson’s mid-sized customers. Called B2Bi Express, the new product is available via SaaS or can be installed on-premise. Axway bills B2Bi Express as a scaled down, less expensive version of its flagship business process management (BPM) suite, Synchrony, which is composed of more than 20 products and is capable of overseeing hundreds of thousands

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• Kronos Gives iSeries HR App an HTML Overhaul

  March 31, 2009 Alex Woodie

  There’s nothing wrong with being “green.” Indeed, some people today see being green as a mandate from Mother Earth. But for human resources managers who must train and retain employees, the AS/400’s character-based “green-screen” interface is a giant turn off and an obstacle to be overcome. To that end, Kronos, which knows a thing or two about human resources, delivered a new release of its iSeries Central suite of HR apps last year that features HTML screens throughout. You wouldn’t know about iSeries Central version 6 by watching for Kronos announcements or monitoring industry publications, because the Chelmsford, Massachusetts,

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• Varsity Delivers Analytical Solutions for Shippers

  March 31, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Varsity Logistics last week unveiled a collection of new business analytics products that are aimed at putting more usable information into the hands of shipping operations managers. The new products include TransData, a prebuilt data mart designed to crunch historical shipping data that runs in the IBM i (OS/400) environment, and ShipView Plus, a browser-based reporting tool that includes dashboards and drill-down capabilities. Varsity has been working with System i business intelligence software developer New Generation Software for the past year in the creation of ShipView Plus, which was originally scheduled for release last summer. As software development projects often

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