The IT Jungle

Will Big Blue Deep Six Its X86 Server Biz?

April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It was a sea change in the personal computing industry when IBM, which lost billions of dollars in the commercial PC business that its brand helped establish, sold off that business to Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group at the end of 2004 for $1.25 billion. And it might be another sea change for the IT industry, with IBM out on the leading edge again, as it is apparently in discussions with Lenovo to sell off all or part of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo.

I know what you are thinking. IBM is the number three maker

Executive Reality: You’re Not The Lone Ranger

April 22, 2013 Dan Burger

Who’s the decision maker in your company when it comes to approving IT budgets and the new projects that get the green light? And more importantly, does that decision maker understand the Power Systems running the IBM i platform? For the past 10 years or so, there has been a behind-the-scenes, conference within a conference held in conjunction with the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition. It is called the IT Executive Conference (ITEC), and it needs to have a greater impact.

As far as I know, this is the only IBM i-specific conference for executives. Most of the attendees, which

As I See It: Yet Another Modest Proposal

April 22, 2013 Victor Rozek

No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks. Why so modest? Why not just get rid of teachers altogether? It is seldom presented so bluntly, but that’s the general thinking of a fledgling movement called Minimally Invasive Education, which prefers technology to teachers. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Given what educators are grappling with these days, the prospect of escaping the classroom may seem like a blessing.

We have been tossing educators into the fray for several thousand years with tolerable results. But the world is changing faster than the president’s commitment

i Is For Investment

April 22, 2013 Dan Burger

Just like any other company, IBM has to make decisions on which technologies to invest in. Of course IBM is in the business of selling technology, although it prefers to be known for selling solutions. As an IBM customer, you buy technology, or you can buy solutions if you prefer. In our IBM i community, where most everything is business oriented, the technology must prove to be useful. It must make business sense, so it’s interesting to take note of what technologies are most worthy of investment.

Dave Nelson, director of IBM i development, and Alison Butterill, IBM i product

Power Systems Sales Stalled–Again–By Power7+ Rollout

April 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The first quarter started out pretty good for IBM, according to the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge. But as it progressed, Big Blue had sales executions with some big mainframe and software deals that pushed out more than $400 million in revenues. And with the Power7+ entry and midrange Power Systems launched in February and not shipping until the end of the quarter, sales of these machines stalled for the second quarter, too. Pushing the Systems and Technology Group to report a substantially larger pre-tax loss than it did in last year’s first quarter.

In the March quarter,

IBM Is Working On New Software Licensing Schemes

April 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

The old tier-based licensing scheme worked great for many years, but is rapidly outgrowing its usefulness, thanks to widespread virtualization, cheap CPWs, and cloud workloads. Some software vendors who play by the P-group rules have taken it on the chin, while others have jury-rigged complex rules to make ends meet, and managed service providers (MSPs) just roll their eyes. IBM apparently has taken notice of the problem, and the Power Systems team is working on some kind of fix, IT Jungle has learned.

Ordinarily it wouldn’t be news that IBM is working on a new licensing scheme. After all, Big

Remain Software Improves ALM Workflow, Readies Multi-Platform Capabilities

April 17, 2013 Dan Burger

Change management in IBM midrange shops is much more precise than its equivalent on other platforms. It has also been very platform specific. That was all well and good when the platform was dominant in its world. But it’s rarely a standalone platform these days. Development in multiple languages has made single-platform change management too limited. And that’s what led Remain Software to introduce a workflow management product it calls Gravity.

Gravity specializes in process automation, improved collaboration, and smooth communication among development teams. That’s phase one, which is available now. The actual multi-platform capabilities will be introduced later this

How Do I Load This Digital Certificate On My IBM i Machine?

April 17, 2013 Hey, Joe

A banking client is requiring us to load a Verisign Class Secure Server CA – G3 certificate authority (CA) certificate on my IBM i box. But when I try to load it into Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), DCM gives me this error: “An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.” What’s going on?

–WC

This is a fairly common problem and it has an easy solution. The certificate won’t load because in addition to loading the bank’s Verisign Class Secure Server CA –

Extract Zoned And Packed-Decimal Values From Character Fields, Take Two

April 17, 2013 Ted Holt

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Sometimes a reader of this august publication asks me about a problem that I don’t face, and I reply with an academic answer. But when I face the same problem, my interest ceases to be academic, and I look for a more practical solution. Such is the case with the use of SQL to extract packed- and zoned-decimal fields from a string of character data.

In the January 19, 2005, issue of Four Hundred Guru, I answered a question from Mary, who wanted to create a logical

Encoding XML (Or HTML) From Within RPG

April 17, 2013 Bob Cozzi

RPG developers who jump to the web and CGI programming soon learn that a stream-based syntax requires the use of certain control characters. Unlike native database, which uses structures and hidden attributes to control field size and starting and ending locations, HTML and XML rely on <i>tags</i>, agreed-upon syntax for start and end delimiters. You may be familiar with Comma Separated Values and the use of both the comma and the double-quote as the delimiters for that type of file. XML and HTML use much more verbose values as their tags or delimiters.

Tags do double duty; they separate data

Previous Articles Next Articles

Search for: