• Starving For IBM i Security Skills

  August 18, 2014 Dan Burger

  Skills keep organizations moving forward. The person who has skills and who can prove it is a hot commodity these days. Professional development is a great investment whether it is a company investing in its IT staff or an individual investing in his or her career. There is a skills gap and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of it, or let that gap get so wide you can’t jump back across. Let’s take security skills as an example. Many of you know Robin Tatam, a subject matter expert on security for the COMMON user group who

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• ManH Dives Into ‘Clienteling’ with GlobalBay Buy

  August 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Manhattan Associates last week announced it has acquired the assets of GlobalBay Technologies to boost its omni-channel strategy with new “clienteling” capabilities. The deal with VeriFone nets ManH a collection of solutions designed to improve how retailers interact with their customers. VeriFone’s sold a collection of offerings through its GlobalBay line that would allow smaller retailers to use their iPads to complete transactions. This included hardware like card readers, PIN pads, printers, scanners, and cash drawers. But for ManH, what likely grabbed its attention was the software side of GlobalBay, including offerings like inventory tracking, loyalty programs, and online appointment

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• Power8 Packs More Punch Than Expected

  August 18, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is something you don’t see every day in the systems business. IBM is getting even better performance out of the new Power8 processors that were launched back in April than it anticipated. Systems performance engineer Alex Mericas, who works in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, gave a presentation at the Hot Chips 26 conference in Silicon Valley last week, revealing that that the Power8 was delivering a little more oomph than expected. As The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM revealed a lot of the details around the Power8 chip about a year ago at the Hot Chips 25

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• Admin Alert: More On Porting User Profiles Between IBM i Partitions

  August 13, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  After receiving reader email about my recent tip on how to port IBM i user profiles from one partition to another, I found there were two items that deserved more explanation and correction: 1) Restoring user profiles for multiple users; and 2) related parameters and objects that a restored profile needs. Here are some corrections and additional information that fill in the gaps that were missing from my previous article. Correcting How To Use RSTAUT For Multiple Restored User Profiles Reader David Miller asked me to clarify what I meant when I said the following about restoring private authorities for

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• Do It Now!

  August 13, 2014 Hey, Ted

  In our RPG programs we protect input operations (CHAIN, READ, etc.) with an error-handling routine that notifies users of record locks. That is, the RecLock subroutine sends a break message to the locking user and displays a window with lock information to the requesting user. This logic is not working in one of our programs, and we can’t determine why. Can you help? –Kent I’m glad Kent wrote with this problem. It gives me an opportunity to write about a topic that has been on my mind for some time. But first, here’s a trivia question for you to think

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• The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 5: File Definitions

  August 13, 2014 Jon Paris

  While the changes in data definition introduced by the new free-form RPG support are great, I have to admit that it was probably the free-form file specifications that raised the biggest cheer from me. Let me tell you why. I have always hated F-specs. Those nasty little single column codes drove me crazy. I could never remember what went where. I know I’m not the only one. All of the programmers we have taught RPG to over the last few years have also had similar problems coming to grips with with F-specs. I am reminded of this almost every time

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• IBM Cooks Up Online Consultant Shopping

  August 11, 2014 Dan Burger

  What do you get when you cross consulting services with e-commerce? You get IT assessments from IBM that are only a mouse click away. Order online. Delivery within 24 hours. Credit card payments accepted. It’s called IBM Global Business Services Online and it comes in five flavors: social media, mobile app migration, application development analysis, and value-enhancement examinations of either SAP or Oracle applications. These are not designed to address large-scale engagements and complex issues. The goal is to assess the current situation and recommend a product and a plan for accomplishing an improved and IBM-approved outcome. And the targets

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• Avnet Financials Illustrate IT Industry Volatility

  August 11, 2014 Dan Burger

  Cautiously optimistic is a popular description of the business climate. It is most often said with the emphasis on optimistic, but it seems most businesses, in reality, emphasize the cautious. The IT business is a lot like that, but what we are seeing is an unevenness that spins the weathervane toward and then away from the direction of optimistic. You really can’t find a better example of this than Avnet, the huge electronic components and IT distribution business that moves IBM products, plus plenty of products and services from other top-tier vendors, through the sales channels. Avnet just closed

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• IBM Tweaks Power8 CPU And Memory Prices Up

  August 11, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM was not happy with some of the initial prices it set for memory and processing capacity on the new Power8 systems that were launched back in April. In announcement letter 314-088, IBM raised the price of the core activation on the EPXH feature card. This card has a 12-core Power8 processor (really two half Power8 chips slipped into the same socket) that plugs into the Power S824, which is a two-socket machine that can run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. Its clock speed is set at 3.52 GHz. Back in April, when the machine debuted,

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• IDC Says IT Spending Will Come In A Bit Higher In 2014

  August 11, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are more than halfway through the year, and the forecasters at IDC have taken a look at the state of the economies of the world and the political situation around the globe and come up with a new IT spending forecast for 2014. The good news is that after revising its forecast down back in May, spending is now projected to rise as much this year as it did last year. To be specific, IT spending will rise by 4.1 percent as expressed in U.S. dollars and at 4.5 percent in constant currency. Three months ago, the economists

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