• Small Biz Owners Are Sticking It Out, Survey Says

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the small businesses in the Western economies accounting for a large number of jobs and the bulk of jobs growth, you can bet that the government and IT companies who are keen on selling their wares to SMB shops are very interested in knowing exactly what is on the minds of entrepreneurs right now as we all cope with the recession in various economies. To that end, software giant Microsoft‘s Office Live small business unit and a tech headhunter called Elance together commissioned a market researcher named Decision Analyst to survey small businesses owners about how they felt

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• IBM Cuts Back on Discounts on Power Systems i-DS8000 Deals

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September, IBM announced a special deal on its high-end DS8000 disk arrays for customers attaching those arrays to Power Systems servers sporting the i5/OS V5R4 or i 6.1 operating systems. This deal was tweaked in early December, and then again last week. The tweaks last week are important because they raised prices on the configurations for the DS800 arrays, which given the state of the economy and IT budgets at larger enterprises, seems a bit odd. The deal has four different Power System i and DS8000 disk array pairings. The first configuration is for a DS8100 with 9.3

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• Freeborders Expands its AS/400 Tech Center

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably knew that the AS/400 and its progeny were popular in India because of the first several waves of outsourcing and offshoring that hit the shores of America in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as companies tried to cut cost. But apparently there is some play now for the AS/400 in Chinese offshoring operations. A privately held company called Freeborders that is located in San Francisco and operates software development and data centers in China, announced last week that it has expanded a so-called “center of excellence” based on the AS/400. (The company said AS/400, not iSeries

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• IBM Talks Up Notes/Domino Numbers

  January 19, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the annual Lotusphere trade show dedicated to the Notes/Domino and related software kicking off yesterday and running until the end of this week, you can expect IBM to be talking quite a bit about Lotus products this week. IBM already let the cat out of the bag about Notes/Domino 8.5, which was announced two weeks ago with very little fan-fare (that was being saved up for the Lotusphere show, presumably), including support for Apple‘s Mac OS X operating system for the client and server sides of the Notes/Domino combo. The Lotus support for the Mac operating system would

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• Server-Printer Combo Deal Results from IBM-Ricoh Alliance

  January 19, 2009 Dan Burger

  IBM Global Services and its WebSphere software division should be expecting a boost now that IBM and Ricoh have a new deal to share sales networks. The arrangement more closely ties IBM’s service oriented architecture efforts with Ricoh’s document solutions lineup. Two years ago, IBM and Ricoh created a joint printing business so that IBM could focus on its core server, storage, software, and services businesses. That high-volume printer business (IBM called it InfoPrint and it has retained that name), along with Ricoh’s document management software, was a good match for a great many IBM mainframe and midrange shops. And

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• Bypass Locked Records in SQL Queries

  January 14, 2009 Dear Intelligent Colleague

  This tip is a follow-up to both of the tips I published last week. Like Bypassing a Locked Record, Take Two, it has to do with locked records. Like Be Specific When Updating With SQL Cursors, it deals with SQL updates. You may remember that there are two ways to update in SQL. The positioned update uses a cursor to update one row at a time, as we talked about last week. Updating through a cursor is similar to updating with native I/O. The searched update, the easier and more powerful of the two, does not work through

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• Data Queues vs. MQSeries

  January 14, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Does anyone have any knowledge or references related to the difference in performance between doing a put to a journaled data queue vs. doing an open and a put (no connect) to an MQSeries queue? –James In MQSeries, opens are expensive, so if you keep the queue open and do multiple puts, you will get very good performance. Using a data queue, you will get better performance as long as there are not too many entries in the data queue. If the data queue overflows (no telling where this might occur, but I have seen it around 100 messages), then

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• Admin Alert: Looking for i5/OS Trouble, Part II

  January 14, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  Last week, I discussed the best ways to automatically monitor iSeries, System i, and Power i systems for hidden signs of trouble, and I focused on monitoring the QSYSMSG and QSYSOPR message queues for developing problems. This week, I’m changing direction to discuss several specific i5/OS monitoring situations that can also help you detect system problems as they occur. Trouble-Finding Tools As I mentioned last week, the following are the best places to look for trouble in your OS/400, i5/OS, and i operating systems: The QSYSMSG message queue The System Operator (QSYSOPR) message queue Disk drive statistics Active job

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• IBM Throws Apple a Bone with Notes-Domino 8.5

  January 13, 2009 Alex Woodie

  It used to be that Mac users would have to wait a year or more to get the same version of Lotus Notes that Windows users had. But IBM changed that in one fell swoop last week when it unveiled Lotus Notes 8.5 at the Apple MacWorld expo in San Francisco and delivered functional parity between the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions of Notes. Version 8.5 also introduces XPages, a much-anticipated new development tool, and various security and administrative upgrades. IBM expressed some much-delayed love for Macintosh at last week’s MacWorld show. The initial release of Notes version

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• Binary Tree Migrates Notes E-Mail to Google with New Product

  January 13, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are looking to save money by moving from a Lotus Notes e-mail system to a Google-based e-mail system may want to check out the new CMT for Google Apps product launched by Binary Tree last week. The product, which is a specialized version of its Common Migration Tool (CMT) platform, automates much of the work of migrating Notes e-mail inboxes and account information to the hosted Google platform, and helps to ensure a smooth transition. While IBM‘s Notes and Microsoft‘s Exchange (and Novell‘s Groupwise, to a lesser extent) continue to slug it out for

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