• m-Power Takes IBM i Mobile Apps Offline

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that develop with mrc‘s technology can generate HTML5-powered mobile apps that continue to work even without an Internet connection. The new capability was delivered this month with an update to m-Power, mrc’s Web application development tool. Despite the proliferation of 4G cell networks and Wi-Fi hot spots, there is the occasional dead spot on this vast North American continent. A person’s ability to live-tweet his mid-morning coffee break–let alone place a sales call or check the order status for an important customer–is severely hampered in such a place. As the adoption of mobile business apps increases,

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• Raz-Lee Certifies IBM i Security Tools with McAfee

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that run IBM i security software from Raz-Lee Security can now feel comfortable hooking that software up to enterprise security tools from McAfee as a result of the certification that McAfee has bestowed upon the Raz-Lee products. The integration allows IBM i shops running Raz-Lee tools to bubble suspicious events detected on IBM i up to the security information and event management (SIEM) tools from McAfee for broader and more thorough security protection. The certification ensures that Raz-Lee’s iSecurity suite can communicate accurately with two products from McAfee, including its Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) and Enterprise Security Manager (ESM),

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• LaserVault Debuts New Backup Option for IBM i

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  If you’re in the market for a backup and recovery solution for IBM i, you might want to keep Electronic Storage Corp. and its LaserVault line of solutions on your list. The Oklahoma company already offered several backup solutions through its Universal Backup Device (UBD) appliance and its LaserVault Backup software offering. This month the company fleshed out its UBD lineup with UBD Synch. The new UBD Synch offering is an optional feature for the UBD appliance that provides replication of compressed and encrypted backup data from a primary UBD appliance to a secondary UBD appliance, or to a separate

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• Profound UI Handles Long-Name Aliases for RPG Coders

  January 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  There are several reasons why RPG is viewed as a washed-up old legacy language to most of the non-IBM i world. IBM got rid of one of them when it widened its use of free format specs with IBM i 7.1 TR7. And Profound Logic is helping to dispel another with the latest release of its Web app development tool, Profound UI, which will help wean RPG coders away from cryptic, 10-character field names and toward descriptive aliases. To an outsider, trying to decipher the 10-character field names used in RPG can be exercise in futility. Without some kind of

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• IBM Cuts Flash Copy Tags For Storwize V5000

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange Storwize V5000 disk and flash arrays were just announced last November, aimed at small and midrange shops who need more than a V3700 but don’t need a full-on V7000. And IBM is already tweaking pricing on some of its features. In particular, in announcement letter 314-002, you can see that IBM has cut tags on nine different feature codes relating to the Storwize software for this V5000 machine. IBM doesn’t ever tell you the description of the features with the price changes, which is maddening. But that’s why you have me. So, here is the chart of

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• IBM Rules The Patent Roost For 21 Years Straight

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If patents were money, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office would be rolling in it. But wait. . . . Patents are money, in a way, and they are just as surreal and real as Bitcoin. You make some intellectual investment and you get the right to commercialize an invention and prevent others from doing so. Last year, the USPTO issued a whopping 277,835 utility patents, a record number for the U.S. government. Utility patents cover machines or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or physical in nature, while design patents cover the shape of objects and their ornamentation. For many

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• SAP Credits Cloud, HANA For A Terrific Year

  January 20, 2014 Dan Burger

  With celebratory back-slapping for its fast-growing cloud business, SAP delivered good news during its preliminary Q4 and 2013 year financial report. Based on the unaudited numbers, the company increased its annual software and cloud subscription revenue by 10 percent to €5.21 billion. The complete software and software-related service revenue grew 11 percent to €13.94 billion. By SAP’s reckoning, which seems a little over zealous, this marks the fourth year in a row that SAP has posted double-digit growth. Overall, SAP software revenue slipped 2 percent to €1.9 billion in Q4 compared to the prior year’s quarter. Those decline is driven

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• IBM Gets EMEA Integrators And ISVs To Push Power Systems

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations wants to peddle more Power iron, and it is working with the reseller and software application vendor community to give business partners and systems integrators a piece of the action if they work with solution providers to close deals. Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1004, the 2014 Power ISV Solution Connection Program is giving said business partner and system integrator companies rebates that range from $500 to $3,000. Here is what the rebate schedule looks like: As you can see, the bigger the box, the bigger the rebate. Moreover, you will notice that

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• IBM Broadens Power Systems SAS Adapters

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long time since the Power 795 was first introduced, and the machine is getting a bit long in the tooth with the Power8 systems looming for initial delivery sometime around the middle of this year. But IBM needs to keep trying to push these high-end, and presumably very profitable machines. Last November, IBM cut the prices on processors and main memory for the Power 795, and now the company is offering new SAS controllers aimed at grafting flash storage and recent LTO tape drives onto the big bad boxes. In announcement letter 113-010, IBM is

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• JD Edwards And The Big Red Money Machine

  January 20, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The end of 2013 brought some significant milestones for Oracle‘s JD Edwards customers. Specifically, JDE World and EnterpriseOne shops that are running older releases can no longer get mainstream tech support from Oracle. If you’re one of those shops and you’re running your applications on IBM i, you’ve undoubtedly heard all about this from Oracle, in no uncertain terms. Among ERP vendors, nobody is as active as Oracle in policing its users and enforcing licensing agreements. Whether it is signing a new enterprise software contract or negotiating a renewal, “aggressive” is a word that has been used to describe

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