• IBM Offers Rebates On CBU Edition-PowerHA Combo

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM wants to sell the Capacity BackUp Editions on its earlier generation Power7-based servers–the ones not announced last week–and it is willing to give some instance cash rebates to customers to help grease the palms a little. In announcement letter 311-148, the IBM i Capacity BackUp with PowerHA offering is giving customers who buy a Power 720, 740, 750, 770, 780, or 795 CBU Edition machine and a license for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i Standard Edition rebates. Those buying the Power 720, 740, and 750 get $1,500 back, those buying the Power 770 and 780 get $2,000, and

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• Connectria Customers Pleased with Hosted Services

  October 17, 2011 Dan Burger

  No matter if you call them hosted services, managed services, or cloud services, the common denominator is services. Can a hosted services company provide service at a level that meets extremely high expectations? Inquiring minds want to know. A simple “trust me” doesn’t close the deal. So to make sure customers are satisfied, a hosted survey provider checks in frequently with its customers. A customer satisfaction survey comes in handy in determining what’s right and what’s wrong. Apparently, Connectria is keeping its eye on its customers like a cat watching a mouse hole. Last week, the company sent out

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• UNICOM Acquires ITSM and z/OS Software Companies

  October 17, 2011 Alex Woodie

  UNICOM Systems made two separate acquisition deals last month, including the purchase of iET Solutions, a developer of IT service management software (ITSM) aimed at helping companies achieve ITIL compliance, and illustro Systems International, a developer of mainframe utilities for z/OS and z/VSE shops. In early September, Mission Hills, California-based UNICOM bought illustro, a Dallas, Texas-based company that develops a range of software primarily aimed at IBM System z mainframe community, including z/OS and z/VSE shops. The company’s flagship product is a Web-enablement suite called z/Ware that transforms the 3270 datastream into XML and HTML. The company also

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Preoccupy Wall Street

  October 17, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  IBM has almost always been a darling of Wall Street. It is Big Blue, the bluest of the blue chips. This year IBM shares have risen more than any of the other 29 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; they currently sell for about 13 times earnings. Hewlett-Packard is also a DJII component. It has significantly higher revenue than IBM. For the past five years it has grown faster, too. It sells a larger number of servers than Big Blue. But its name is mud on Wall Street. HP’s price/earnings ratio is half that of IBM. How come? Looking

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• That Perplexing Power7+ Processor

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like you, I only jump to the wrong conclusion when I come to a cliff and generally only if I believe I am going to make it to the other side. There was a lot of circumstantial and graphical evidence that IBM was going to launch a Power7+ kicker to the current Power7 processor, and as we all found out last week, that didn’t happen. As we report elsewhere in this issue, IBM put out new systems with denser memory and new PCI-Express I/O peripheral slots, but with the same or essentially the same Power7 processor features. I hear a

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• IBM i 7.1 Tweaked To Be More ISV Friendly

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October 12 Power Systems announcements, the IBM i 7.1 operating system-database combo was tweaked with Technology Refresh 3, the second update this year and the third such refresh since IBM moved toward a regular update cycle that was more akin to (but still distinct from) the way AIX gets updated. The Technology Refresh focuses on new functions and I/O support that is meant to be installed with the current operating system release and be less disruptive. Steve Will, the chief IBM i architect at IBM, explained this Technology Refresh approach to readers of The Four Hundred

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• I/O, Memory Boosted On Entry, Enterprise Power Systems

  October 17, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I can sum up IBM‘s entry Power Systems announcements on October 12, which are not being formally announced until sometime this week, in a way that will flash you back to either your own or your parents’ childhood. This is the refrain of the theme song from The Power Systems Show: “They’re servers, nearly identical servers: They look alike, they cost alike, at times they even compute alike–you can lose your mind when computers are two of a kind.” Aren’t you glad I didn’t sing that? Be grateful that I think a newsletter should be printed and not

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• Skipping Robot/SCHEDULE Runs on AS/400-Class Machines

  October 12, 2011 Hey, Joe

  On our System i 550, we use Robot/SCHEDULE for batch processing. Every so often, we have a programming issue where we have to skip running a job in the middle of a long job stream. The skipped job sometimes has reactive jobs hanging off it. We still want to run the reactive jobs, even when we don’t run their prerequisite job. Got any ideas? –Keith Like many other shops, we also use Robot/SCHEDULE for running batch job streams on our System i and Power i machines. Like you, we’ve encountered the same issue where we want to skip running one

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• Add Outfile Support to Your Applications

  October 12, 2011 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. When I compare IBM i to other operating systems, I am amazed. This well-designed, well-built operating system has numerous features that are foreign concepts to other operating systems. One of those features is that of “outfiles”, files that are built by display-type and work-type commands. If you haven’t done so, consider that it may be advantageous to write your own commands with outfile support. In general, programs that write to database files always write to certain database files, and that’s as it should be. A file maintenance program

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• TMW Unveils New Trucking Solutions at User Confab

  October 11, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Trucking software developer TMW Systems made three product announcements at its recent TransForum 2011 user conference. Among the new solutions are a new Android version of its driver communication system, a new Web-based driver recruiting and hiring application, and a new integration point between one of its IBM i-based dispatching applications and Qualcomm‘s Hours-of-Service (QHOS) program. QHOS is an electronic on-board recorder that automatically tracks how many hours a driver has logged on the road. The software transmits this data to the dispatch center using the cellular communication system from Qualcomm Enterprise Services that’s widely used in the trucking

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