• Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage

  April 23, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In the old days, to print a document you had to have driver software on your computer that matched an attached or nearby printer. In offices with a diversity of computers and printers, this was a nightmare. New applications, new types of documents, new clients, or new printers meant finding new paths through the thicket of operating systems, networks, drivers, and page description languages. These days you can let your printer vendors deal with linkage. You can even consider tossing out those persnickety PCs and riding out on the new frontier where the mobile clients range. Some of the inspiration

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• Summit Partners Acquires Control Of Help/Systems–Again

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “In the private equity world, you rarely double in on a company,” explains Mark Ties, chief financial officer at Help/Systems, the maker of automation tools for IBM i, Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms. But doubling in, as Ties called it, is precisely what private equity giant Summit Partners did on April 17 when it bought the majority stake control of Help/Systems. Summit Partners was founded in 1984 and has raised more than $14 billion in capital from investors in those ensuing 28 years, which has been invested in more than 340 companies in North America, Europe, and Asia. Of

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• IBM Loses Money On Hardware In Q1

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have a new president and CEO, but you would be hard-pressed to find any difference between the numbers turned in by Ginni Rometty in her first quarter at the helm of Big Blue and those of her predecessor, chairman Sam Palmisano, in his last quarter standing at the wheel in the fourth quarter of 2011. To many, this makes IBM almost boring in its predictability, but if you are counting on rising earnings driving a rising stock price as well as dividends, this is probably the kind of hum-drum thing you like. In the first quarter ended in

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• AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud

  April 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, there is no such thing as AWS/400, but conceptually speaking, the collection of 30 cloud services are the modern analog to the simplification and integration philosophies built into the AS/400 many years ago, all souped-up for a modern, Webby world. Or, at least that is what I kept thinking as I attended the AWS Summit in New York City last week. AWS is, of course, short for Amazon Web Services, and it is the cloud computing subsidiary of online retailing giant Amazon. We have two main jobs here in the Four Hundred stack of newsletters. The first, of

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• Admin Alert: Planning An i 6.1 Upgrade

  April 18, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  As of this writing, my staff and I are preparing to upgrade the first of three System i 550 partitions from i5/OS V5R4 to i 6.1 on April 14. In an earlier article, I discussed getting started with a 6.1 upgrade. As a case study, this issue I’ll go over the planning process for actually performing the upgrade by reviewing my planning process for an actual IBM i partition. Completing The Pre-Upgrade Tasks At this point, we’ve completed most of the heavy lifting needed to perform the upgrade. With our Applications group, we’ve gone through and corrected all system

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• Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

  April 18, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I did not take your suggestion to write a subprocedure and embed it in a service program. It seemed like too much trouble to me. I wrote a program instead. It does the trick and it’s a lot less complicated than all those hoops you told me to jump through. I guess ILE isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. –Chuck Chuck presented me with a problem. I suggested he write a subprocedure to solve it. He didn’t like the idea of creating a module, writing binder language, creating a service program from the module, adding the service program to

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• A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters

  April 18, 2012 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Too often we humans give little thought to what we do or why we do it, even though taking an organized approach to an activity has its advantages. In this article, I present one approach to the handling of parameters in programs and tell why I consider this a good way to process parameters. Parameters are data that are supplied to a program in order to affect the way it behaves. For example, the ability to supply file names, member names, and various options to the Copy File

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• IBM Buys Varicent for Cloud-Based Sales Performance Management

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The big gold rush in the cloud is on, and the latest outfit to strike it rich is Varicent, a developer of compensation and sales performance management software. It was snapped up last week by a cloud- and analytics-hungry IBM for an undisclosed sum. Varicent’s compensation and sales performance software is used by companies that use salespeople to drive much of their revenue. By more effectively managing the sales-related data–which is often spread across PCs and spreadsheets–Varicent can drive more profits from sales, and ensure that the variable rate of compensation for the salespeople is “aligned with strategic business

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• IBM i Homepage Gets Refreshed with PureSystems Launch

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve visited the IBM i homepage since the big PureSystems launch a week ago, you’ve noticed that things looks a bit different. IBM i regulars will see that familiar navigational aids to view information about IBM i hardware, software, solutions, and news are gone, in favor of a sleeker, more modern look that features easy access to Twitter and Facebook. IBM is definitely on the cutting edge of IT, as it proved with last week’s launch of the new PureSystems line of systems, which feature autonomic management capabilities that should dramatically reduce the care and feeding required to

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• Joomla’s CMS Surges in Popularity

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007. Things seem to be going well for the Joomla CMS, which the organization says is used to power about 2.7 percent of the world’s websites, or about 1.6 million websites by one count. And there’s a lot more in the pipeline. The organization says that at the end of March 2011, the CMS had been downloaded 22 million times.

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