• Dutch Vendor Targets American ALM Market with SoCal Partner

  June 28, 2011 Alex Woodie

  North American IBM i shops looking for an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool have another option following Solutions First LLC‘s announcement that it is distributing Dutch vendor Remain Software‘s TD/OMS in the United States and Canada. The principals at the Southern California company say TD/OMS has a feature that sets it apart from the pack: exceptional integration with 4GLs, including support for IBM‘s EGL. A platform-independent version of TD/OMS is also in the works. It’s been a tumultuous market lately for the vendors and buyers of IBM i-based ALM tools. After experiencing tremendous growth in the early

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• IBM i Shops Have Choices When it Comes to Mobile Apps

  June 28, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Demand for mobile application development tools is surging among IBM i shops, as it is for businesses at large. Luckily, IBM i shops have a wide selection of tool vendors to choose from when making their mobile Web decisions. In this mobile roundup, we’ll explore what the Web enablement vendors have to say about the surge of interest in mobile computing and their approaches to helping IBM i customers. Mobile computing in the enterprise has come a long way from the bad old days of wireless application protocol (WAP) and wireless markup language (WML), which came to the forefront–amid a

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• IBM Adds Disaster Recovery, Archiving to SmartClouds

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The independent software vendors making backup, recovery, and high availability software and their service providers who are moving out onto the Internet to offer remote disaster recovery and arching services to SMB data centers just got some pretty tough competition: IBM. IBM launched its SmartCloud public infrastructure cloud back in April, based on X64 servers and VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor. IBM’s earlier test and development SmartCloud was based on Red Hat‘s KVM hypervisor, and Red Hat sources tell me that the SmartCloud public cloud will also support KVM at some point. The fact that IBM’s SmartCloud public

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• RPG Summit to Emphasize Mobile Apps this Fall

  June 27, 2011 Dan Burger

  Mobile applications are a hot topic today and looking like an even hotter topic next week, next month, and into the foreseeable future. A good indicator of that is the attention given to this topic at the upcoming RPG and DB2 Summit, the bi-annual conference that emphasizes modern IBM i development topics. It was just announced last week that the fall Summit would take place October 17 through 19 in St. Louis, Missouri. “The first time we did a session on mobile computing maybe seven or eight people sat in on it,” says Paul Tuohy, one of the principle

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• Worldwide ERM Software Sales Growing Fast in 2011

  June 27, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  This year has brought a lot of encouraging economic recovery news to the IT market, and here comes another bright spot. According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise resource management (ERM) applications market year-over-year revenue growth of 4.6 percent in the second half of 2010, and that trend is continuing into 2011. It’s not unexpected that companies with money to spend would be looking to put it toward integrating disparate systems, which would hopefully free up more dollars for other projects in the long-term. The number of dollars predicted to pour into this market is a little surprising. IDC forecasts

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• iFoundation Grant Application Deadline is June 30

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What is better than free money? (Keep it clean here, people. This is a family newsletter.) Very few things, and one of them is free speech and the other is free beer; I even like free puppies. But few things beat free money, and high availability software maker Maxava is giving away $50,000 in grants to the IBM i community. But you only have until June 30 to submit a grant application, so hop to it. Maxava launched the iFoundation effort back in late March to help carry the cost of local and national user group meetings, education and training,

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• Reader Feedback On The Power Systems-IBM i Road Ahead

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hello, Timothy: I have always liked your articles. For large shops doing MSHA using replication, we would love partition mobility, but the high volume of I/O our internal storage performance gives us seems to also preclude any chance at the mobility we need. Note: IBM SANs could not provide the performance required when we tried the shift way back in 2003 and to this date nobody wants to risk SAN performance–even with EMC technologies. If I could have SAN replication functions (and clustering functions) with internal storage (and its great performance) without having to implement iASPs, then we would be

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• Old Gear Gets The Ax In More Power Systems Trade-In Deals

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you were thinking that you might be able to combine some of IBM‘s trade-in deals to get your hands on older Power Systems machines, think again. IBM is continuing to sift through its deal books and removing just about everything that doesn’t have a Power7 chip embedded in it. I say just about because the Power6-based high-end Power 595 server seems to be, for the moment, immune from the scissors, as was the case in the modified deal I told you about two weeks ago. But all the other Power6 and Power6+ based gear in the deal

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• Mad Dog 21/21: In Hack Signo Vinces

  June 27, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  Would you want your company to be highlighted in the news like Citibank, the International Monetary Fund, Lockheed Martin, Google, and Sony? Maybe not. Recently, they all became famous when high tech vandals invaded their computer systems. Of course you might think you are safe because you’re True Blue and IBM‘s products and its developers’ skills will protect you. Think again. In January, hackers were able to trash IBM’s iconic developerWorks site. Maybe it’s time to brush up on security. You might learn something that saves your cookies, including the ones in your browser. The concepts

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• Winners and Users: IBM’s ISV and SMB Choices

  June 27, 2011 Dan Burger

  The manner in which IBM co-exists with its independent software vendors (ISVs) says a lot about how Big Blue has changed its business plans in the Lou Gerstner-Sam Palmisano era. The IBM i user base is a good example, even though it is unique in many ways. None of IBM’s other platforms have or had the participation of so many application and tool vendors. From the time the AS/400 was introduced, it was the application server. And it was extremely successful. Thanks, in large part, to the ISV community. In those halcyon days of business computing, particularly in the

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