• RedPrairie to Buy JDA for $1.9 Billion

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  JDA Software, a publicly held developer of retail management and supply chain planning software, has agreed to be bought by RedPrairie, a privately held developer of supply chain execution and warehouse management software, for $1.9 billion. When fully merged, the new RedPrairie will have about $1 billion in annual revenue, and compete globally with Oracle and SAP. However, a wide mix of platforms used by both companies raises new questions on the long-term plan for JDA’s loyal IBM i customer base. Rumors started swirling a week ago that JDA Software had hired JPMorgan Chase to handle JDA’s

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• Tableau Attracts Big Attention for Unique Approach to Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  One business intelligence software vendor that has been garnering big headlines lately is Tableau Software. The Seattle, Washington, company says it has come up with a better way for users to not only explore their large data sets, but to display the information in a visually compelling way. The software is being used with data from IBM i servers, but there’s more that could be done to streamline the connection, a Tableau manager says. Tableau started as a research project of Chris Stolte, a graduate student at Stanford University who was researching and studying under professor Pat Hanrahan, who

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• CA Opens 2E Arrays to Outside Web Services

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the 2E development environment released by CA earlier this year makes it easier for organizations to expose 2E business logic to the outside world through Web services. The new Enhanced Array support added to 2E version 8.6 marks a fundamental change in the product, and marks the beginning of a new era in how 2E shops will develop and maintain their IBM i applications in the future. Array programming is well-suited to fourth-generation languages (4GLs) like 2E because it enables lots of individual pieces of data to be updated simultaneously with a single operation. Numerous programming

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• Premise Keeps Tabs on IBM i Cloud with Custom Dashboard

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Premise, a managed service provider (MSP) based in Clearwater, Florida, have built a nifty Web dashboard that tells them all they need to know about the IBM i environments they manage for clients. From ASP usage and MIMIX replication status to rack configs and cache battery status, the dashboard gives Premise engineers and customers instant answers to many of the most commonly asked questions. What’s more, the dashboard may soon be available for any IBM i shop to purchase. Premise is an IBM Premier Business Partner with expertise in hosting IBM i, xSeries, storage, and MIMIX

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• Paging Doctor Watson

  November 5, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Last week, we told you about IBM‘s Watson supercomputer heading to college, and now comes news that Watson has aspirations in the medical field. While it is unlikely that Watson will be seeing patients any time soon, IBM researchers want to focus on Watson’s question answering technology, which enables the Jeopardy! champ to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly find important correlations between facts buried within huge volumes of data, ultimately assisting healthcare workers to make better decisions about patient care. Performing differential diagnosis–the kind of thing that House MD does with a mean

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• IBM Pushes Moore’s Law Limits With Carbon Nanotube Transistors

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Silicon-based chip etching technologies are going to reach the lower limits of the atomic scale at some point, and chip equipment and chip designers are all looking out ahead into the future to try to come up with new technologies that will extend or replace current silicon-based chips so out electronics will get faster, more capacious, and less expensive over time, tracking with Moore’s Law. Scientists working at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, offer one possible tweak to current technology, having come up with a technique that will create chips based on carbon nanotubes, which offer better performance

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• Agilysys Makes Dough From Hospitality And Services

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  Led by an economic exclamation point in its hospitality business dominated by hotels and casinos, Agilysys found a way to make some revenue gains during the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 year ended in September. Agilysys reported a 9 percent year-over-year gain in its hospitality segment, which allowed the company to post a net revenue gain of 3 percent. A retail segment that was off 1 percent from the same quarter one year ago was a bit of drag total revenue, which inched ahead to $54.2 million. A summary of the first six months of 2013 shows the hospitality

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• Arrow Boosts ECS Sales Despite System Slowdown In Q3

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite an expected and somewhat abrupt drop off in server sales in the third quarter that most IT suppliers experienced, master reseller Arrow Electronics was nonetheless able to boost its sales of software and storage to compensate and post growth in its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group in the third quarter. However, overall revenues took a hit and profits took an even bigger dive in the quarter thanks to falling margins in ECS and components and falling revenues in components. In the quarter ended in September, Arrow had $4.96 billion in revenues, down 4.3 percent. Net income at the company

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• Michigan LUG Members Face Reality-Based Web Query Training

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  There may be no better example of what a local user group should be than the educational programs run out of the Southeast Michigan iSeries Users Group. Last week, SMiUG and the Western Michigan IBM i User Group rolled up their sleeves and got to work on a project that is bringing together 37 members for a hands-on, learn-by-doing IBM Web Query experience. It will be a month-long, problem-solving exercise with the goal of completing two real-world projects for a pair of companies looking for modern query capabilities that include dashboards, drill-downs, and mobile components including iPhones and iPads.

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• Testing For Success Sometimes Doomed To Failure

  November 5, 2012 Yvonne Enselman

  As my position has shifted from being a programmer to a tester, I have not lost interest in the IBM i world. How the platform functions and what trends drive development remain relevant to my job. If I don’t understand it, I can’t test it. While I find information that helps me grasp what the techies are doing, it is difficult to find information relevant to other teams in our i-focused publications. It’s time to start talking about application testing for IBM i developers and other IBM i professionals who don’t understand why platform matters. Starting from the developer point

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