• Another IFS Interface

  November 30, 2011 Ted Holt

  The Work with Links (WRKLNK) command is underwhelming. If it were my software, I would add a lot of options to it. But since it isn’t my software, I’ll content myself by using an alternate green-screen interface that has features that are missing from WRKLNK. The alternate interface to IFS directories is the Edit File (EDTF) command. If you specify a single file name in the FILE parameter, EDTF opens the file in the editor. However, if you specify a directory name or a wildcarded name, EDTF presents a directory listing. (The Display File (DSPF) command works the same way.)

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• Read Once, Update Many

  November 30, 2011 Ted Holt

  Using SQL rather than native I/O to query and manipulate the database is more than replacing one syntactical regulation with another. It requires a different way of thinking. Nevertheless, corresponding features do differ, and today I show one way that the SQL update differs from a native update. Consider the following scenario from a project in which I was recently involved. I needed to read a database table (physical file) from top to bottom. After I retrieve each row (record), I called one or both of two high-level language programs, using parameters to pass data values from the table and

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• Starsoft Taps Veryant to Port IBM i COBOL to Open Systems

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Starsoft, an Israel-based developer of software for the insurance and financial services industries, is using Veryant technology to help it migrate its COBOL applications to Java and open systems, and to modernize the interfaces, Veryant announced last week. The move will help Starsoft offer solutions that run on server platforms other than IBM i, and bring other benefits, the company says. For more than 20 years, Starsoft has used COBOL and IBM i technologies to develop applications that automate key business processes for companies in the insurance and financial services industries, including policy production, underwriting, claims, collections, commissions, and

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• Under Armour Expands Use of ManH’s WMS

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Clothes manufacturer Under Armour has adopted Manhattan Associates‘ IBM i-based warehouse management system (WMS) to use in its European operations, the software vendor announced yesterday. Under Armour first implemented Manhattan Associate’s best-of-breed Warehouse Management for IBM i application in 2006 to replace a previous warehousing system that wasn’t working out. The applications (including Extended Enterprise Management and Slotting Optimization) have proven critical to Under Armour’s warehousing operations in Maryland and California. As Under Armour was getting ready to move its European supply chain hub to a new 3PL-run fulfillment center in Venlo, the Netherlands, the company decided to standardize

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• Infor to Move HQ to NYC

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Next summer, Infor will move its global headquarters from near Atlanta, Georgia, to New York City, the company announced last week. Infor says the move was based in part on the large amount of technology talent in the “Silicon Alley,” and that it plans to hire and house more software engineers and graphic designers in its new location. Infor will move its headquarters from the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta to the island of Manhattan. It will occupy an office at 641 Avenue of the Americas that features an open, loft-style design that “will fuel product innovation by providing an environment

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• Netential Launches an i Cloud Solution for JDE

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Netential, a U.K.-based managed service provider (MSP), this month launched Cloud 9, a new IBM i-based cloud offering for running production Oracle JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne workloads. Under Cloud 9, Netential and its data center partner, Blue Chip , will host, manage, and service customers’ development, test, or production JDE World and JDE EnterpriseOne ERP applications running in an IBM i environment. The World offering is supported up to version A9, and the pay-as-you-go price starts at £2.18 per hour, or about $3.40 per hour. The EnterpriseOne offering is supported up to version 9, and starts at £0.75

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• Velocity Ramps Up DR Services for Lawson, JDE, and Kronos Customers

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Velocity Technology Solutions rolled out new disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity options earlier this month geared toward getting customers’ critical ERP systems back up and running after a disaster even quicker than it could before. The remodeled DR services plan is based largely on Velocity’s recent acquisition of WTS, and is aimed specifically at customers of Oracle-JD Edwards, Infor-Lawson, and Kronos. Velocity is a growing managed services provider (MSP) that has been expanding lately into cloud computing and hosted DR services. In September, the New York City-based company, which has more than 20 years of

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• ‘No Scalability Limits’ Shown with Fiserv Power7 Benchmark

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A very impressive benchmark of Fiserv‘s IBM i-based Premiere core banking application was recently conducted at an IBM Innovation Center in San Mateo, California. The relatively low usage of Power7 resources during the test led the companies to conclude that “there’s no known limit to Premier’s scalability.” IBM and Fiserv loaded Premiere on a four-core Power Systems Model 750 platform equipped with solid state drives and rated for 24,000 CPW. In that configuration, Premier was able to support more than 5.1 million online transactions processing (OLTP) per hour (including customer and account inquiries), which is a record for the

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• Zend Studio 9 Hits the Gym and the Cloud

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A leaner, meaner version of Zend Studio is now available that will start up faster and consume fewer resources than it did before, thanks to new capabilities for turning off unneeded functions. Also, Zend Technologies has added new cloud connectors to the Eclipse-based development environment that makes it easier to run Zend Studio development workloads on a Zend cloud, or production workloads on an Amazon, Rackspace, or IBM cloud. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Zend Studio–which supports development of PHP applications for deployment on IBM i, Windows, Linux, and other platforms–had let itself go and

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• Connectria Launches Amazon S3 Cloud Clone

  November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The data center and cloud hosting company Connectria this month launched a new cloud storage solution that uses an API that’s compatible with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), enabling companies to move their Amazon S3 storage to Connectria without big changes to business processes–and possibly saving them money. Since it launched in 2006, Amazon S3 has become an extremely popular storage mechanism for entire websites, images, and computer backups. According to Amazon, at the end of June, S3 stored more than 449 billion objects and processed up to 290,000 requests per second. However, some people may not be comfortable with

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