• Reader Feedback On RPG And Java At The Crossroads

  December 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, Dan: In reading your article on open software and the IBM i platform, you said: “One of the faulty labels spray painted on the IBM i is that it’s a bad neighborhood for open source.” I just spent a very frustrating week trying to figure out how to call a PHP program from an RPG program, so I can understand how people can feel that way. I was able to call the program and pass parameters to it, but the output from the PHP program remained behind some wall in Qshell and was unavailable to the RPG program.

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• Enterprise Social Networking Finds Integration Is A Hoot

  December 16, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM has a passion for social media. It’s social networking platform, Connections, is the nucleus of the social strategy that has lifted Big Blue to the leader in enterprise social software market share, as determined by IDC earlier this year. Enterprise social networking puts the emphasis on collaboration and, with a variety of social channels that enhance collaboration, the integration of those channels becomes part of the picture. Integration has arrived. In order to tap into the full potential of enterprise social networking, the channels need to be a combination of internal and external avenues. Connections handles the internal collaborative

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• As I See It: Traditions

  December 16, 2013 Victor Rozek

  It’s during the Christmas season that I miss my parents most. All I have left of them are memories and an old album of faded pictures; familiar faces frozen in time like insects caught in amber, remnants of a different era. Each year, as I look around the holiday table, it’s poignant to notice not only who is there, but who is missing. Among the gifts passed down to me, was a ritual which we practiced on Christmas Eve. Like many customs and rituals, this one arrived with immigrants–my parents were both born in Poland–and it was maintained as a

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• 2013: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 16, 2013 Alex Woodie

  As we get ready for 2014, it is worth taking a look back at 2013 and seeing the year that was in the IBM i midrange marketplace. From new servers and operating systems to new security flaws and new business ventures, it was an eventful year. So sit back, grab a beverage, and prepare to reminisce on the IBM i year that was. In January, computer security was a front-page news item after several critical vulnerabilities were discovered in Java, including a zero-day vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in lieu of patches from Oracle. It turns out that

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• IBM i In The Middle Of Infrastructure Overhaul

  December 16, 2013 Dan Burger

  Emerging markets are the accelerator and brakes on the IT spending bus. Countries in Latin America, India, Russia, and particularly in Asia have are expected to drive IT growth to a much greater degree than the mature markets, where businesses are advancing with one foot on the brake pedal. IBM, like any other multinational organization knows where the treasure is hidden. And the IBM i benefits from globalization just like everything else. Asia has mature markets–Japan and Hong Kong being the prime examples–where the economy is more in line with the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, which have

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• All Your IBM i Base Are Belong To Us

  December 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I gave you my best estimate of what the current distribution of machines by processor family and software group was based on some information I have heard through the grapevine from IBM and my own estimates. The data showed a number of remarkable things, among them the fact that there are some pretty old machines out there in the installed base despite the massive improvements in price/performance with successive generations of Power-based systems in the past decade. What can be done to ensure that this base of customers, which accounts for

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• InsightSoftware.com Revs JD Edwards Reporting Tool

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  CFOs and finance managers at JD Edwards shops who need budgeting software may want to take a look at InsightSoftware.com, which yesterday unveiled a new release of InsightUnlimited, its flagship business intelligence software for JD Edwards. Headquartered in Ireland, InsightSoftware.com specializes in developing business intelligence software for Oracle‘s E Business Suite and the World and EntepriseOne editions of JD Edwards. The update unveiled yesterday is focused on the budgeting aspect of InsightUnlimited, one of three components of the suite, which also includes reporting and reconciler components. With this release, users can now define budget details by inserting rows

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• iPad App Integrates with Salesforce.com, IBM i

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The Casey Group last month launched Sales Navigator, a new business application that allows users to access their Salesforce.com data from the comfort of an iPad. Sales Navigator makes it easier for sales forces to access contacts, calendars, and customer location data that’s stored in their Salesforce.com environment running in the cloud. The iPad application is designed to enable sales personnel to access and organize large contact lists, plan daily sales routes, and improve customer relationships. Users can plan their upcoming day with the software, and view leads and contacts on a map. It also allows users to log customer

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• Demystifying AIX Monitoring for IBM i Hacks

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s getting tougher for IBM i professionals to pretend that AIX isn’t there. Every year, it seems, more of IBM‘s system software for Power Systems servers runs either in AIX or PASE, the AIX runtime for IBM i. However, for many IBM i admins, AIX is an enigma that’s wrapped in mystery and shrouded in a riddle. Halcyon Software recently published a best practices guide for AIX monitoring that’s aimed at getting past the Unix gibberish and laying out the issues in plain English that regular IBM i types can understand. The biggest AIX concern of IBM i shops

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• Gamma Soft to Feed DB2/400 Data to NuoDB

  December 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Gamma Soft recently announced it has formed a partnership with NewSQL database startup NuoDB to provide data integration capabilities. The partnership will see Gamma’s data integration software serving DB2/400 data, among others, into NuoDB’s database in a real-time manner. NuoDB is one of the more promising startups chasing the sudden interest in, and demand for, so-called “NewSQL” databases that have been built from the ground up to handle huge data volumes and a variety of data types in a way that would cause the schema to break in a traditional SQL database. What makes NuoDB interesting is how its distributed

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