• Winning PHP App Pops IBM i Precepts

  April 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i is often portrayed as out-of-date platform for running ancient applications long since placed into maintenance mode. If you want real innovation, the mainstream thinking goes, you’d best look to more “modern” platforms. But if the award that two European companies recently won for a PHP-based logistics application is any indication, that preconception deserves to be popped, posthaste. In late March, Proximity and Scandinavian House took home the SHD Logistics Award 2015 in the Innovation Technology category. The award was granted for STREAM, the PHP-based application that Proximity developed to provide order, delivery, and transportation management capabilities. Scandinavian House,

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• IBM i ERP Vendor Finds Success With SaaS

  April 6, 2015 Dan Burger

  As a topic of discussion, software pricing is an incendiary device. But a flame without fuel goes out quickly. And for a lot of companies, status quo means no open flames and don’t even think about throwing that wood on the fire. There’s another term for status quo. It’s called complacency. The opposite of complacency is not change; it’s investigate. In terms of software, that means taking a look at software as a service. Software licensing, support, and maintenance costs can be pretty steep, particularly the up-front licensing charges, which are often a point of fixation for customers. There’s a

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• Crazy Idea #483: A Leveraged Buyout Of IBM i

  April 6, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes the crazy ideas come from us, sometimes they come from you. Sometimes we are all pondering the possibilities at the same time and it seems like an idea is almost a meme, spreading like a virus, hopping from brain to brain, or as I sometimes suspect might be possible, vibrating in the cosmic ether for others to reflect on if they can only hear the image. Whatever scenario this one is, a bunch of you have reached out and asked me to write about the possibilities of a leveraged buyout of the IBM i business. And so, here we

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• Quadrant Simplifies Path To FoIP Glory

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the biggest challenges in setting up a virtual fax over IP (FoIP) system is getting the telephony settings right. Screw up one of the dozens of settings in a typical install, and you’ll quickly be on the phone to tech support. With a new release of Quadrant Software‘s QuadraDocV FoIP software, the vendor added a graphical wizard that significantly simplifies the setup process. Quadrant launched QuadraDocV two years ago to provide a virtual FoIP solution, primarily for its large base of existing IBM i customers. As a replacement for its popular FastFax “black box” appliances, QuadraDocV installs

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• Enough With The Huge Performance Increases Already, IBM i Pros Cry

  April 1, 2015 Swift

  IBM i shops are up in arms this week over the huge performance increases that IBM is seeking to foist upon them with the latest Power8 servers. “Eight threads per core and 12 cores per socket? Really IBM?” said clearly exasperated programmer/analyst Jack D. Sparrow. “I mean, what on earth am I going to do with all that raw, unbridled processing power?” Sparrow is not alone. In fact, a growing number of IBM i professionals are beginning to vocalize concerns about IBM and its sinister plan to equip every customer with a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower that will

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• SoftLanding Latest ISV To Add iASP Support

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The issue of whether to support independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) in your IBM i setup is not one to be taken lightly. For starters, just migrating from traditional ASPs to iASPs can be a major project, and your software will need to be tweaked to support it. While IBM i shops are moving to adopt iASPs, the growth is slow and steady rather than a mad dash. But for SoftLanding Systems, demand for iASPs was enough to justify modifying its change management tool, Turnover, to support the technology. iASPs debuted with the platform way back in 2001 with

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• Cilasoft Introduces Single View Of Data From Multiple Systems

  April 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  Data aggregation, for many organizations, is more like data aggravation. Automating data consolidation from multiple files, even those that exist in different systems in different locations, has proved to be problematic, especially for businesses that run from multiple sites. When updating and aggregating data becomes a bottleneck, IT managers start searching for answers. Double the frustration when the distribution of data from one file to multiple files is also a factor. Solving those issues was a priority for Cilasoft, a security and compliance software vendor with a long history in the IBM midrange market. Last week, Cilasoft unveiled CENTRAL

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• Zend And BCD Get A Little Closer For PHP

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies and BCD have been working together for about three years to help IBM i shops adopt PHP for developing new applications. Under a new partnership agreement unveiled recently, Zend will be referring customers to BCD for custom PHP-on-IBM i development work. But that’s not all the two vendors have up their respective sleeves. After analyzing the existing relationship between Zend and BCD, executives with the companies realized that a regular reseller model was not going to cut it, says Jeff Lovette, vice president of global sales and channels for Quadrant Software, which acquired BCD last year. “What

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• RubyGems Are The Foundation Of Success

  March 31, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  In my previous article, I discussed a RubyGem named xmlservice but didn’t really dive into what Gems are, why they exist, and how we can use them to save a tremendous amount of time. That’s what this article is about. But before we dive into geekdom, it is worth digressing into a perspective I’ve gained by observing the top open-source-language camps. I often get asked “Why Ruby? Isn’t XYZ language more popular?” Usually the XYZ language is PHP or Java, as I think it is safe to say PHP is the most popular web language out there and Java

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• Dynamic Lists In Static SQL Queries

  March 31, 2015 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted: We have an SQL query that can take from one to 13 two-byte codes that become part of an IN clause for row selection. We have no idea which codes they will need to see beforehand; it’s an interactive thing. We are using dynamic SQL. I would like to find a static solution. Any suggestions? –Harold Sure, Harold. I do this sort of thing from time to time, and I use static SQL to do it. Let’s say those two-byte codes are state abbreviations, like the state abbreviations we use in the USA. You probably have a form

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