• IT Shops Are Getting Wise to the Unified Communications Hype

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the underlying technologies that allow us to reach out and touch someone through the telephone networks have changed dramatically and continuously over the past 50 years, the convergence of computer and telephone networks and new software to merge business applications seamlessly with telephone networks has led to much enthusiasm about so-called unified communications. And companies are getting wise to the hype. IT analyst firm IDC has done its fifth annual Voice over IP with InfoWorld magazine (which is owned by the same company as IDC and a slew of other IT trade rags, including ComputerWorld), and has used

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• IBM Helps Partners Learn New Data Center Skills

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as I have been watching the IBM midrange, the company has been trying to push more and more gear through its reseller channel and put the burden of training for sales, configuration, and support onto the partner channel. Business partners grouse about ever-lowering margins, and the pressure that comes from Moore’s Law, which makes all aspects of computing that have to do with electronics cheaper as people costs go up every year. The spread between the two is where the growth in the IT market has come from. But, if you are a business partner or an

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• The Tech Sector Stops Adding Jobs–Cuts Soon?

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even before Wall Street and the other stock markets of the world started melting down with such intensity in late September and early October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit in the U.S. Department of Labor, was showing that computer hardware and software tech companies have stopped hiring in the States and telecommunications companies have started making cuts. The U.S. economy has been losing jobs all year, and in the September statistics, which you can read in detail here, the bureau calculates that 159,000 people lost their jobs. (This is the non-farm labor pool, by the way.) Jobs

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• Oracle and SAP Still Haven’t Settled the TomorrowNow Suit

  October 20, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, application software powerhouses SAP and Oracle will be back on the phone trying to get their ongoing, and for SAP, embarrassing, lawsuit concerning the now defunct TomorrowNow third-party support business going again. According to a report on the Dow Jones newswires, Oracle and SAP had a conference call to try to sell the suit, and are going to take another crack at it. The report in the Dow Jones wire had an SAP spokesperson confirming that the talks were ongoing with the judge in the case and that the next conference would be on October 20. The lawsuit

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• Displaying Multiple Results Sets in Run SQL Scripts

  October 15, 2008 Skip Marchesani

  The SQL Script Center, which is part of the System i Navigator Database function, allows the user to execute a script that contains single or multiple SQL statements. If the script contains multiple SQL statements, the user has the option of executing a single SQL statement, the entire script (starting with first statement in the script and ending with the last statement in the script) or two or more consecutive SQL statements as a subset of the script. The results from executing an SQL statement are shown in the lower portion of the Run SQL Scripts window called the Output

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• A Practical Way to Add Exports to a Service Program

  October 15, 2008 Ted Holt

  My life was confusing enough already. Then along came IBM with binder language, the CL-like language we use to define the list of exports of a service program. Awhile back I sat down to try to find an effective way to deal with service program exports. Here’s what I came up with. When you create a service program, you must list the exports, that is, the data and/or modules that are available to callers. There is a shortcut. If you specify EXPORT(*ALL) in the Create Service Program (CRTSRVPGM) command, the system will generate the list of exports for you. However,

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• Admin Alert: Preventing Multiple IPs from Stopping Internet Traffic

  October 15, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  We recently added a second IP interface to one of our i5/OS partitions. After an IPL, the partition stopped talking to Internet-based trading partners. It stopped trading FTP files with outside vendors, it wouldn’t relay email, and it generally stopped talking to the outside world. This week, I’ll look at the common problem that took down our Internet communications and how you can stop it from happening in your shop. A Case Study in Configuring for Multiple IPs After the configuration change, we had two IP interfaces on our partition: one for all our normal IP traffic (10.3.1.55); and a

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• IBM Close to Delivering DB2/400 Storage Engine for MySQL

  October 14, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM is nearing completion of new software that will enable DB2/400 to power the open source MySQL database, according to industry sources. When complete, the new software will enable organizations that run PHP applications running on MySQL on i OS to access data stored in DB2/400, the i OS’s native database, without modifying MySQL or PHP. The software reportedly is in beta tests, with a formal announcement expected soon. IBM first noted its intention to deliver a so-called DB2/400 “storage engine” for MySQL more than a year ago, when it formally announced support for MySQL running on i5/OS V5R4.

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• PKS Provides the Missing Link from RPG to EGL

  October 14, 2008 Alex Woodie

  It’s been a little more than a year since IBM started promoting its previously mainframe-focused Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) as a way for System i shops to move to Java. Instead of writing RPG, the thinking goes, System i shops would develop in EGL, and then generate platform-neutral Java code. However, that plan did not address the problem of what to do with all that RPG code, and how to get started in EGL. Now, thanks to the work of PKS Software, IBM has a tool for converting RPG into EGL. Since it was founded in 1988, PKS has

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• VAI Evolving Products to Meet Customers’ Future Needs

  October 14, 2008 Alex Woodie

  With all of the consolidation that’s hit the i5/OS ERP software market in recent years, there’s one name that hasn’t been called: Vormittag Associates Inc., or VAI as it’s now known. But it’s not for lack of effort by the consolidators, according to Bob Vormittag, the founder and CEO of the New York software company, who says he still turns down offers to sell the company. Instead of taking the quick buck, Vormittag has found that listening to customers and meeting their needs is more satisfying–not to mention profitable as well. During VAI’s user conference last month in Las

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