• IT Salaries In North America To Creep Up A Bit In 2013

  January 14, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Most of us who have managed to stay employed during the last few years of tough economic times are just grateful to be working. Economic unrest has forced companies to drastically downsize or completely shut down, and IT departments have not been spared as many businesses struggle to survive. In many ways, the IT department has done better than other parts of companies, thanks to the ubiquity and necessity of computing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been stress. The good news is that IT pros will see an improvement in pay this year, according to the 2013 IT Salary

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• North American IT Budgets Stalled By Economic Issues

  January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like the rest of us, the analysts at Computer Economics want to know what IT shops are planning to do in terms of capital and operational spending this year. And so the company did a survey in the fourth quarter to take the pulse at IT shops around the world, which in North America at least were jittery because of the elections and the looming Fiscal Cliff issues in the United States. The survey is the basis of the company’s Outlook for IT Spending and Staffing in 2013 report, which was just released. Computer Economics did in-depth surveys of

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• IBM Splits Global Services Again As Mike Daniels Steps Down As GM

  January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A year ago, after taking the helm of IBM, Ginni Rometty reshuffled some executive assignments, and one of the things she did after moving up and out of the company’s Global Services and sales organizations to become the company’s CEO was to get executives in place for the eventual retirement of her former peer at Global Services, general manager Mike Daniels. As 2013 got started, Rometty let IBMers know in an internal memo that Global Services was being split into two bits again, that was because Daniels was retiring on March 31. Several years ago, before it was clear

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• As I See It: Success, The Career Killer

  January 14, 2013 Victor Rozek

  “I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.” Better yet to be a success at something you love and to remain lucid and funny past your hundredth birthday. But Naftaly Birnbaum was an anomaly. He knew what he wanted to do by age seven. Talent and singular focus propelled a career that spanned vaudeville, radio, television, and film. By the time of his death, he was a national icon best known by his adopted stage name, George Burns. Characterizing career success can be as elusive

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• SAP Puts In-Memory Database At The Heart Of Its BusinessSuite ERP

  January 14, 2013 Alex Woodie

  SAP last week made the major leap of officially supporting the use of its HANA in-memory database to power SAP BusinessSuite, its flagship enterprise software. Putting HANA in charge of managing analytical and transactional applications and their data simultaneously marks a huge architectural change for the German ERP giant, and it shows that the company is not afraid to take chances. Breaking the barrier between transactional and analytical data will pay off, SAP says, because it will allow businesses to “analyze and predict instantly.” Ever since IBM invented it and Oracle popularized it 30-plus years ago, the relational database management

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• Help/Systems Buys Dartware To Build Out Heterogeneous Monitoring

  January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems management, security, and analytics software maker Help/Systems continued on its acquisition tear as 2012 came to a close, and last week announced that it had bought Dartware, which peddles a popular system monitoring tool called InterMapper. The move will allow Help/Systems to better expand into the Windows, Linux, and Unix system management, monitoring, and job scheduling markets that are adjacent to the OS/400 and IBM i market that it grew out of. Dartware comes out of the networking corridor that wraps around Boston and extends into New Hampshire. (There’s a reason Network World magazine was up there, after

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• What’s Happening In IBM i App Dev?

  January 14, 2013 Dan Burger

  Green screens scare the daylights (actually not my first choice of words) out of me. Like great white sharks and vampire bats, they have their place in the world. But I don’t want to go to that place. Most people would probably agree with me about the sharks and the bats. There are many RPG and COBOL programmers, however, who are perfectly comfortable in a green-screen world. What in the name of modern application development are they thinking? There is a reason people use the term computer science rather than computer history. IT is an ongoing endeavor. You have probably

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• Admin Alert: Four Things To Do For Your IBM i In 2013

  January 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  A new year always brings new challenges in administering your IBM i machines. Here are the top four things on my 2013 calendar that IBM i shops should look at in 2013, starting this month. #1: Check Your Job Scheduling Date Objects In January If you haven’t already done so, look at any date-dependent job processing objects on your system and change them to ensure that they will still work correctly in 2013. These objects might include: Any data areas that affect date processing. Files that need to go through yearly purge routines. Any RUN and OMIT date objects that

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• Tracing Routines Explain Why The Computer Did What It Did

  January 9, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Every week someone asks me why the computer did what it did. For instance, not long ago a buyer asked me why the computer did not send our requirements for a certain item to the vendor who supplies the item. I started digging through the program that generates the files we send to vendors. Then I realized there was a better way. Let me tell you about it. In many shops, business rules are embedded in source code. Sometimes rules are hard-coded. I’ve seen code that directly referred

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• What’s New With CPYFRMIMPF And CPYTOIMPF?

  January 9, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  As my years as a developer whiz by, I often find myself ignorant of the newest features available. For example, I’ve used the Copy From Import File (CPYFRMIMPF) and Copy To Import File (CPYTOIMPF) commands so often that I just became (as my old boss used to say) “fat, dumb, and happy” when using them, not realizing IBM has added new features since the time I first studied these commands. I’ll briefly share a few of the relatively recent enhancements to these commands. First of all, in i7.1 Technology Refresh 5 (TR5), CPYTOIMPF has been enhanced with a new parameter

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