• Spending Energy, Buying Results

  December 5, 2016 Dan Burger

  If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got. Some people do more with what they’ve got. Some businesses do more with what they’ve got. Ake Olsson is a “do more” guy and the energy he puts into IBM i modernization projects has resulted in multiple successes. He loves to learn and travels great distances to do that . . . and to change. Olsson is a guy who invests in staying current with technology and helping others do the same. He believes in creating new opportunities and encouraging

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• Server Sales Slow Across The Board

  December 5, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The major suppliers of servers to the datacenters of the world that are public have turned in their financial results in recent weeks, and those numbers do not look good even though they are nothing as alarming as what we saw ahead of the recession in 2001 through 2003 or the Great Recession that started at the end of 2007 and we think ended maybe two and a half years later. We may or may not be heading into a national or global recession in the coming year or maybe the one after that, but as far as the server

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• What A Trump Presidency Might Mean For IBM Rochester

  December 5, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Big changes are expected in national policy when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017. From healthcare and climate change to tariffs and international trade, Trump has promised to do things that will help to “make America great again.” But what will this mean for IBM, one of the most American of success stories, and specifically its Rochester, Minnesota, plant, home of the IBM i server? During his historic presidential campaign, Trump insisted that middle-class Americans were getting the short end of the economic stick, and that he would

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• RPG Website Resurrected. Is the Language Next?

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community got a peak at the latest RPG website last week when the official wraps were taken off www.ile-rpg.org. While it may appear to be new, the website is in fact a resurrected (and updated) version of an older website, rpglanguage.biz, that was essentially abandoned by its previous owner. The website’s new owner, TEMBO Tech Labs, is confident that it will help spread the word about RPG’s prowess as a business language. John McCay originally created the rpglanguage.biz website back in 2007 to provide a place where RPG developers could share tips, concerns, and

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• ERP System Gets an A+ in User Satisfaction

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Infor generally received high marks from users of its A+ application, according to a recent report by the Frantz Group. However, the fact that many users of the IBM i-based distribution system are going five to 10 years between ERP upgrades means many are missing out on potentially valuable features, the report concludes. There were no major revelations in last week’s release of the Frantz Report, titled “Customer Research Survey: Infor A+ and IBM iSeries,” which depicted a swath of North American IBM i shops in the light you would have expected. That is, Infor A+ customers are generally

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• VAI Teams With Forward Thinking For GPS Truck Tracking

  November 30, 2016 Dan Burger

  Midsize manufacturers and distributors have unique requirements when it comes to delivering their products to market. Automation and integration of business processes are playing a big role in achieving higher efficiency. For example, there was a time when GPS tracking gathered truck location and activity data for only the largest freight hauling specialists. But now there are small and midsize manufacturers and distributors that can track their own fleets, adding a customer feature that improves satisfaction rates and provides analytics that increase efficiencies. VAI, a successful mid-market ERP software developer with IBM midrange customers in the fields of distribution,

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• Skills Shortage Prompts Fresche’s New View of X-Analysis

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Different companies have different ways of dealing with the emerging IBM i skills shortage. Some shops may look to college grads for fresh new faces, while others may seek to retrain existing IT personnel in IBM i skills. Still others will seek to exit IBM i through wholesale migration to X86 or cloud platforms. At Fresche, the skills shortage presents an opportunity to get a well-regarded code analysis tool called X-Analysis into the hands of more people. X-Analysis, you will remember, was Fresche Legacy’s first big purchase following its 2012 name-change from Speedware. Developed by the British software

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• IBM Tweaks More Power Systems Peripherals

  November 30, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a bit of time to drill down into the annual Power Systems announcements from Big Blue, which in the case of this year happened across September and October. We have told you all about the new systems, such as they are, and updated IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 software releases, as well as various other components. In this week’s installment, we are going to drill down into some of the new peripheral cards that IBM is putting into the Power Systems iron. First up is a new cryptographic accelerator, called by the unwieldy name of the PCIe Cryptographic

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• One Way To Condense A Verbose Spooled File

  November 29, 2016 Ted Holt

  IBM i includes many reports that we can use to glean a lot of information. If you run packaged software, the vendor likely includes many other reports. The problem with such reports is that they often contain more information than what you need and want. After all, they’re written for the world at large, not tailored for you. It may be that a utility that resides on your system can transform reports into something more suitable for you and those who use your system. First, let’s get a report. DSPLNK OUTPUT(*PRINT) DETAIL(*EXTENDED) DSPOPT(*USER) Running this command on one of the

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• Odds and Ends

  November 29, 2016 Hey, Gurus!

  The end of the year is upon us and the holidays are fast approaching. That sounds like a good excuse for some odds and ends. I hope you find something helpful here.–Ted Hey, Ted: I’m writing in response to Michael Sansoterra’s article, Native Regular Expressions In DB2 For i 7.1 And 7.2. I don’t use regular expressions much, but our C# development team does. Here’s a regular expression that I find to be of help. // count the slashes in the URL Dcl-S Count Packed(4); Exec sql set :Count = REGEXP_COUNT('/qibm/ProdData/Java400/bin/JavaDoc','/') ; –Steve Three decades or so ago, when

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