• Being CIO At IBM Means You Are IT

  October 28, 2013 Dan Burger

  Being the CIO at IBM must be like being the top tailor at Ralph Lauren or the number one test driver at Ferrari. It’s a great job, but you have more eyes watching you than a Siamese cat at a German Shepherd police dog academy. Jeanette Horan doesn’t seem to notice, even though there are 470,000 IBMers in 140 countries depending on her to deliver IT services like it was a box of doughnuts. Expectations? Yeah, you might say there are a few. Horan’s job is essentially to put into practice what IBM preaches. Ideas are only worth the paper

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Nice Clients, Shame About The Servers

  October 28, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Reporting quarterly results, Microsoft said business customers are buying tons of software, more than offsetting a slump among consumers who prefer tablets to PCs. That’s a mixed picture, but a cheerful story compared to that of IBM. Big Blue’s best-selling computers are Linux engines for mainframes. Power server revenue is down 38 percent at a time when, paradoxically, the market is offering IBM a superb opportunity: There are TN5250 and TN3270 apps for the newest tablets and smartphones, even models still in the pipeline. Yet IBM is moping when it should be throwing a Bring Your Own Green Screen

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• Big Data, OpenPower Are Big Levers For Power Systems

  October 28, 2013 Dan Burger

  Doug Balog, the general manager for IBM Power Systems for right around three months, was the big data evangelist at last week’s Enterprise2013 conference in Orlando, Florida. In the context of his presentation, he referred to data as the “new national resource” and described Power Systems as “a great box for data analytics.” Although he lauded Power Systems hardware for its ability to do high performance analytics and its “massive compute capabilities” with parallel processing, plenty of cores, lots of threads per core, and high I/O, he followed that up by adding that “conversations with customers are about problems and

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• Budget For Infrastructure And Shared Systems, Say IBM Top Brass

  October 28, 2013 Dan Burger

  The more that IBM‘s enterprise computing business changes, the more it stays the same. Last week at the Enterprise 2013 conference, a newly constructed crossroads of Power Systems and mainframe technologies, the big dogs in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group preached unprecedented changes in IT while also emphasizing centralized computing, a strategy that it has always promoted as the best way for enterprises to operate. The audience seems tentative about the first, while being solidly behind the second. Analytics, cloud, social, and mobile are all barreling down the road at the same time. Individually they are more than a

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• IBM Wraps Up New PureFlex For IBM i Bundle

  October 28, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in June, IBM put together a bundle of hardware, software, and services that was aimed at customers who wanted to run the IBM i operating system on PureFlex converged systems. The deal offered some pretty good discounts, and it really had to because the underlying Power Systems platform was based on a quad-socket p460 server node. This is a bit too much iron for many IBM i shops, and the node is also in the P10 software tier. To IBM’s credit, the fact that the p460 node is in the P10 tier rather than a P20 tier just

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• Admin Alert: A Primer For Setting Up PC5250 SSL Connectivity, Part 2

  October 23, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Last issue, I published Part 1 of a primer for setting up IBM i PC5250 Telnet sessions to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. That article described everything you need for configuring your IBM i server to use SSL Telnet. This issue, I’ll look at the PC Windows side and show you how to configure your IBM i Access for Windows clients to use SSL when starting Telnet sessions. Revisiting The Overview Last time, I listed out these six basic steps for configuring Telnet SSL connectivity between a PC and an IBM i partition. These steps are performed in your

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• Make Your DB2 For i Apps Environment Aware

  October 23, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  Time and time again, applications need to know something about the environment they’re running on. For example, if an application uses dynamic SQL and it needs to know what features are available, then knowing what version of IBM i it is using can help it decide how to build a query. Likewise, when auditing the source of database changes, it’s useful to know the TCP/IP address of the host requesting the change. Consider the case where an application may need to know if a certain required PTF has been installed. While there have always been APIs to retrieve this information,

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• Responsive Web Design

  October 23, 2013 Paul Tuohy

  The design of web pages used to be a very straightforward process. You picked a style and made sure that that style was applied throughout your website. Usually, each page would have a fixed width of 500 or 700 pixels, which would be formatted in a grid pattern to best represent the content of the page. But that was way back when you only had to be concerned about designing a web page that would be displayed on a desktop or a laptop. Today, your web page might be displayed on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile

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• Micro Focus Finally Goes GA with RUMBA for iPad

  October 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Micro Focus last week announced the general availability for its RUMBA 5250/3270 emulator for the iPad. The GA announcement comes a full nine months after the UK-based firm originally launched the emulator for iPad as part of its RUMBA+ roll-out. The Surface client is available now, but the Android client that Micro Focus had originally slated to get into its users hands by last spring will likely be delayed until 2014. The mad dash to merge mobile functionality into our daily lives is not abating. The mobile revolution is here to stay, and it promises to reshape how we think

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• IBS Bundles All Enterprise Apps Into Business Suite 2014

  October 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

  International Business Systems (IBS) this month unveiled IBS Business Suite 2014, a new offering that includes all of the Swedish software company’s business applications. In addition to being a marketing umbrella, the Business Suite implements standard user interfaces and integration points across IBS’ various products. Business Suite 2014 includes functionality in the areas of ERP, Warehouse Management (WM), and Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP). Specific products include the flagship IBS Enterprise offering, which runs on IBM i and Windows, in addition to IBS Dynaman, IBS Bookmaster, and IBS S&OP. IBS says the individual components have been integrated into a suite

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