• Modernization and Mobile Lead BCD Development Efforts

  May 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  Whether working from ground zero or building on existing investments, BCD‘s application development products have long been used by IBM midrange shops. One of the reasons is BCD’s continual investment in developing its product lineup, which handles everything from quick green-screen Web-enablement to multi-platform Web development. And for companies unfamiliar with BCD, here’s a surprise–the company has a newly enhanced business intelligence tool as well. Most IBM i shops are talking about application modernization projects. And each year there are more of these projects deployed. The majority are quick and simple transformations of green-screen apps to Web apps. And

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• Raz-Lee Unloads New Products at COMMON

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security has been on a roll lately. Earlier this year, it launched DB-Gate, which makes external databases like SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and MySQL accessible to IBM i programs. Then at the COMMON show last week in Southern California, the Israeli software vendor launched two more products, including a change management system for the IBM i server and multi-LPAR support for its products. It also provided a glimpse into a product to be released later, called iCommand. Raz-Lee says its new Change Tracker software automatically traces software modifications to IBM i programs at both the source and object levels.

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• Townsend Delivers Fine-Grained IBM i Log Data to SIEMs

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  It’s a big, bad, scary world out there. Cyber-criminals are constantly probing networks, looking for places to plant malware and do their nasty business. To thwart these attempts, an organization needs a good security plan, and possibly invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) program that monitors and correlates all IT activity. Townsend Security recently issued a new release of its Alliance LogAgent Suite that will help protect the IBM i platform by providing SIEMs with more detailed and fine-grained IBM i log data. Townsend Security president Patrick Townsend began his COMMON press conference last week with a

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• LANSA Moves into Native Mobile App Development

  May 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  Mobile application development isn’t always what you think it is. Real IBM i business applications that render on the most popular tablets and smartphones, for instance, do not require RPG programmers to learn HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JavaScript, Java, or Objective-C. Last week, LANSA released a tool for creating apps using RPG/CL with DDS. Those apps will run natively on iPhone and iPad devices now and Android compatibility will be added within a couple of months. LANSA calls this new product LongRange, which is not to be confused with LongReach, the free iOS file-sharing client that LANSA launched late last year

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• Connectria Adds Fourth Data Center And AIX Cloud

  May 14, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  For once, growing clouds aren’t a sign of gloomy days ahead. At least not for Connectria Hosting, which currently provides cloud computing, managed hosting, and custom hosting solutions to more than 1,000 customers in more than 30 countries worldwide. IT Jungle recently reported on Connectria’s plans to host public and private IBM i clouds. Now comes news of the addition of a fourth data center at Connectria to accommodate growing demand. The new data center will be located in a CyrusOne facility in Lewisville, Texas. The data center is a Tier 4 designated facility, which is the highest

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• Do The Twin Cities Two Stop With Help/Systems And RJS Software

  May 14, 2012 Dan Burger

  Two IBM i software vendors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area–with the IBM i homestead in Rochester just down the road–have user conferences planned for mid-September. You couldn’t pick a better time, weather-wise, to explore the upper Midwest, so why not pick up some technical knowledge at the same time? Help/Systems, an automation software vendor, will set up in downtown Minneapolis September 17 to 20. RJS Software, the document management and business process company, will host its event at the company headquarters in Burnsville September 18 through 20. The agenda for Help/Systems will include topics on IBM i operations,

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• Avnet Components And Technology Solutions Businesses Both Slip

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Master reseller Avnet had a somewhat different quarter from rival Arrow Electronics in its most recent quarter, its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended in March. Both its components and systems groups took a hit. In the quarter, Avnet’s Technology Solutions group, which buys systems, storage, software, and services from IT vendors and distributes them through channel partners worldwide, had an 8.1 percent revenue decline, to $2.52 billion. Sales in the Americas region for Technology Solutions fell 9.1 percent to $1.37 billion, and in EMEA they dropped 12.1 percent to $744.8 million; in Asia, sales were up 4 percent to $409.3

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• System Biz Growth Can’t Offset Component Slump At Arrow

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Weakening macroeconomic conditions in Europe and Asia made for a rougher than usual first quarter for Arrow Electronics, one of the two big master resellers in the world for systems and electronic components. However, the systems business was up and the components business was down, which is a better sign than you might otherwise think. During the first quarter ended in March, Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Systems group posted sales of $1.54 billion, up 15.2 percent compared to the year ago period and posted an operating income of $55.5 million, up 42 percent. But the Arrow components biz shrank by

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• Reader Feedback On: Apps And IBM i Evangelism

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This message continues to be delivered to the wrong audience. Most companies that use IBM i in their infrastructure are not in the business of software development. They build apps that are based on the database of third-party solutions or extend apps they have purchased from third-party vendors–such as JDE, Infinium, Lawson, PKMS, PRMS, PRISM, and so forth. Some of these have been screen scraped, but they still utilize the same old RPG III code under the covers, sometimes converted to RPG IV. Software companies need to build modern apps for IBM i. I don’t see that happening. It doesn’t

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• Abacus Puts The i In VIOS With Screaming Power 720 Setup

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two things were made abundantly clear to me as I walked around the COMMON conference and expo last week, attending sessions and talking with people and listening to their complaints. The first is that just about everyone, even die-hard techies, are annoyed with the AIX-derived Virtual I/O Server that is used to virtualize disk and network drivers on Power Systems. The second thing was that we all better get used to it, because VIOS is here to stay. If you don’t want to cope with setting up VIOS on an IBM i or hybrid IBM i-AIX box with maybe a

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