• Managed Service Provider Picks Its Niche

  June 8, 2015 Dan Burger

  If you’re a traditional IBM midrange shop, the idea of managed services provided by a vendor may seem as unlikely as commuting to work in George Jetson’s flying car. But then how do you explain all the managed service providers lining up to do business in the IBM i community? They are all jockeying for position in anticipation of trend toward outsourcing pieces of IT and in some cases, all of IT. Focal Point Solutions Group is carving out a space of its own. Here’s a scenario that is not uncommon. An organization is running important applications on the IBM

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• Enterprise Server Refresh Cycle Gathers Momentum

  June 8, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server refresh cycle is picking up steam, with the market turning in one of the best spurts of growth in the first quarter in many a year and reversing a slight downward trend in server revenues across all vendors and machine types that has been putting pressure on vendors for the past several years since the big bounce after the Great Recession recovery. Some big deals at hyperscale companies, in fact, allowed sales in Q1 2015 to more or less match levels set in the second and third quarters of last year. According to the IDC quarterly server tracker,

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• HelpSystems Adds SkyView Partners To Its Security Assets

  June 8, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM midrange has undergone a transformation in the past 10 years. Technologically? Yes, but there’s also an evolving process of vendor acquisitions and an increased interest in managed services. Last week we saw another prize claimed by HelpSystems as it purchased the security vendor SkyView Partners. The move signals HelpSystems’ interest in developing security as a service for IBM i shops with little or no time to accomplish security initiatives. The SkyView acquisition is not the first IBM i security company scooped up by HelpSystems. It acquired both PowerTech and Bytware in 2008, and then Safestone in 2012,

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• EIM Identifier Naming

  June 2, 2015 Patrick Botz

  Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) is the technology that allows the IBM i to determine which user profile should be used to establish a connection for a person who has authenticated to an IBM i interface using non-IBM i credentials. EIM is easy to set up, but there is one thing you can do that will save you time and effort later. A quick overview of EIM will help explain the tip. EIM consists of three categories of information: EIM Identifiers representing people and entities (e.g., service userIDs) within the organization that have user IDs User Registry Definitions representing the various

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• Beware The Temporary Table

  June 2, 2015 Hey, Ted

  I am writing in response to your article Dynamic Lists in Static SQL Queries. At a recent NEUSG meeting, Tom McKinley of IBM warned us to avoid temporary tables, especially query chains of temporary tables, as they have no history for the optimizer. I like dynamic SQL. I would have left it alone. –Lynne I always enjoy hearing from Lynne because I know I will hear words of wisdom. Lynne raises a good point that I have intended for some time to address in this august publication. Kent Milligan, one of Tom McKinley’s colleagues at IBM’s DB2 for i

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• Paging Cursors And Position To

  June 2, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. I had a reader email in relation to my article Paging Cursors. The article described a method for paging large lists using embedded SQL in RPG, and the reader was wondering if there was a way to position the list at a certain value. Of course there is! Please refer to the original article for all of the gruesome details but the basic concept is that you have a subprocedure that returns a “page” of rows from a result set. A page can be any number of

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• SQL Query And Report Tool Gets The ProData Treatment

  June 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  SQL/Pro 5.0 is the latest in a long line of hard-working IBM midrange computing utilities produced and perfected by ProData Computer Services. Data access, data integration, and the DB2 relational database are ProData’s specialty. The key to the IBM i platform is its database and how developers create applications that ride on top of it. And when it comes to programmer productivity, the Omaha-based tech company gets it. Any database-related development work is going to involve SQL. Years ago, when IBM i was known as OS/400, SQL was an unwelcomed stranger. It’s funny how things have changed for those

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• Maxava Builds On IBM i Sustainability Efforts

  June 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  Corporate citizenship benefits the community. It helps create and maintain a healthy ecosystem for companies that are invested in the IBM i platform and the dedicated, career-oriented people with jobs that are tied to the system. Not everyone has to contribute to the community, but those that do improve the environment for everyone. Maxava, the New Zealand high availability and disaster recovery software vendor, is a shining example of a company actively supporting IBM i sustainability. This will be the fifth consecutive year Maxava has supported the IBM midrange community by offering grants to help fund user group activities

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• For OpenLegacy, Modernization Is All About the APIs

  June 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Modernization means different things to different people. For some in the IBM i space, being modern means adopting a model-view-controller architecture or having a Web user interface, while for others it may mean having a “mobile first” development strategy or using SQL in the database. For the folks at OpenLegacy, modernization means exposing existing business processes using the emerging lingua franca of network-powered computing: The API. While OpenLegacy is, ostensibly, a provider of open source legacy modernization tools for IBM i and z/OS shops (it’s right there in the name), the path to modernization that it prescribes is by

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• Thoughts On The Power E850 And I/O Contraction

  June 1, 2015 Hey, TPM

  Sorry to be so late making my comment about your very good article concerning the Power E850 and IBM i. I agree with most of what you said in the article. I have had a couple of exciting conversations about the Power E850 with Mark Olson, who is an old friend from my Rochester days. The E850 brings back memories of when I worked for Rochester as the interface with Software Group and we were always two years behind on support for all the WebSphere products. It was all about the optics of being behind, not about the immediate need

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