• Virtualization Takes Off on Entry Power Systems

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like server virtualization really is heading to the mainstream on Power Systems machines, if some figures provided by the top brass at IBM are any indication. While logical partitioning has been available on OS/400-based servers since V4R4 was launched with the Northstar PowerPC servers back in 1999, it has been embraced mostly by big shops with big iron even as Linux and AIX partitions were added to the logical partitioning mix. But not so any more, says Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM’s Power Systems division. Handy keeps track of the attachment rate of

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• Ask TPM: IBM’s Dependence on Hardware for Software and Services

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The experts who put together Four Hundred Guru answer a lot of tech questions for the i community about programming and administering IBM midrange gear. But some of your questions are of a strategic or tactical nature, having to do with broader issues in the information technology space or with the i platform in particular. If you have a question you want to get my take on–or you want to use me to get a straight answer out of the people in IBM who know what is going on–then send me an email and I will see what I can

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• COMMON Takes a Trip to DisneyWorld for 2010

  February 23, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s a little too early to book your plane tickets, make your hotel accommodations, and dust off your mouse ears, but it is never too early to tell your kids or grandkids that the COMMON midrange expo and conference is going to be hosted in Orlando, Florida in 2010. My daughter, Ellie, and my son, Hank, have fond memories of when COMMON was last in Orlando, back in 2005. They bug me every couple of months about when my next business trip will take us down south toward the House of Mouse, or any place interesting, for that matter. (When

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• 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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