• Arrow Lets Mid-Market Resellers Buy Sales Campaigns

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Enterprise Computing Solutions group of IT and electronics components distributor Arrow Electronics wants to make it a lot easier for its downstream resellers to put together marketing campaigns and scare up a little business out there in the midrange. To that end, ECS has announced a new sales and marketing tool called MPower SmartCart, which is available to resellers that are members of its MPower Midmarket Partner program. The tool is really a Website that has a bunch of marketing materials for various servers and storage hardware and related operating system, systems, and application software. Partners log in and

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• The Economy Squeezes Manhattan Associates in Q4

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Supply chain software maker Manhattan Associates, which has a sizable business related to the i platform, saw its sales decline in the fourth quarter of 2008, as most IT vendors did. In the quarter ended in December, Manhattan Associates said that software license sales fell 25.5 percent to $13.8 million; services sales dropped 5.7 percent to $53.8 million while hardware and other sales fell by 14.6 percent to just a hair under $8 million. Revenues across all categories in Q4 came to $75.6 million, a decline of 11 percent compared to the year ago quarter. After a restructuring charge

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• Kronos Provides Some Financials for Fiscal Q1

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As perhaps the key software vendor for workforce management products, privately held Kronos used to be a public company and is used to talking about how its business is doing. And so it has provided a few tidbits about how it did in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. For that quarter, which presumably ended in December, Kronos posted sales of $159.8 million, and earnings before taxes, interest, and amortization came in at $24.6 million. Those numbers just hang out there in space, because the company did not provide any comparisons with the prior fiscal year’s first quarter; not did

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• A Bevy of BIFs: Getting a Date is Easy with %Date

  February 18, 2009 Susan Gantner

  Almost every kind of business application uses dates. Hopefully you’re taking full advantage of all the RPG support for date data types to simplify your logic. If you’re using more than one line of code to calculate the number of days, months or years between two dates, or to add a number of days, months, or years to a date, you’re working way too hard! Many of the “dates” we deal with come from a screen or a database file and aren’t true date data type fields. They are numeric or character fields that contain values that we treat as

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• Mismatched Record Name Formats? No Problem!

  February 18, 2009 Hey, Ted

  We have two sets of order files–one current and one history–with the same fields but different record format names. (Who knows why?) The two inquiry programs use the same display file; and yours truly forgets to make changes in the history program when he changes the current program. I get the big brain idea to use the same program for both, but how do I override the history file to the current file when the record format names do not match? –David Let’s suppose your two files are called CURYRSLS (current year sales) and SLSHIST (sales history). The record formats

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• Admin Alert: Solving i5/OS Inquiry Message Whodunits

  February 18, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  Occasionally, a user, operator, administrator, or programmer will incorrectly answer an i5/OS inquiry message, causing system problems. When that happens, it can help to quickly discover how the message was answered, if only to prevent the offending job or user from incorrectly answering it again. This week, I’ll look at some investigative techniques for answering that classic i5/OS question: Who answered that inquiry message? Using QSYSOPR To Find An Answering Job While investigating inquiry message whodunits, an administrator’s first instinct is to display the system operator message queue (QSYSOPR) where the inquiry message originally appeared. When inquiry messages are fresh,

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• Safestone Cracks Down on Excessive Authority with PUP

  February 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Safestone Technologies last week unveiled a new System i security product aimed at reducing the risk posed by users with excessive authorities. Called Powerful User Passport, or PUP, the new software gives administrators a way to grant users powerful authorities for a short period of time, and then force them back to a user profile with less authority when they have completed the tasks requiring special powers. “This particular product addresses the problem of powerful users on the System i,” says Terry Heath, chief operating officer for Safestone, which is based in the UK and has an office in Seattle,

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• Infor Carves Out a Dedicated System i Division

  February 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Infor last week announced that it’s creating a new division that will be entirely dedicated to serving its installed base of 15,000 System i customers. The division, which will be headed by former IBMer Mark Wright, will result in the separation of System i-related sales, support, and most development resources within Infor. The move was made as recognition of the uniqueness of the System i platform and the special skills and knowledge that it demands. As senior vice president and general manager for the System i organization within Infor, Wright becomes the most visible head of the largest System

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• FMS Solutions Finds mrc’s m-Power a Good Fit

  February 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  When FMS Solutions set out to find a Web-based reporting tool to support its customers in the grocery and supermarket industry, the application service provider (ASP) had a few key requirements. First and most importantly, FMS needed a tool that didn’t charge by the seat, which would get prohibitively expensive. It also needed support for System i and Windows databases, and it needed to be easy enough for its customers to use. The company found an answer to all of these needs with the m-Power product from mrc. From its headquarters near Baltimore, Maryland, FMS Solutions provides financial management

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• looksoftware Developing Cloud Connector for i OS

  February 17, 2009 Alex Woodie

  looksoftware last week announced the forthcoming release of a new product called Snap for the Cloud that will provide a cloud computing interface for System i and System z developers. The first release of Snap for the Cloud, which is slated for GA in June, will work with Google‘s Internet-based applications, with support for cloud offerings from Microsoft, Amazon, and others arriving later. For the last few years, Australia-based looksoftware has rolled out new interfaces that allow enterprise AS/400 and mainframe shops to use some of the latest technology and gadgets. For example, last summer, look released

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