As you read this story on Monday, I am dressed up in my journalist monkey suit--tan chinos, a colorful oxford shirt, a brown corduroy jacket, and comfortable shoes--attending a Smarter Planet press event at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Ballroom off Columbus Circle in my hometown of New York, New York. The event, of course, is hosted by IBM, and the main reason I care enough to make myself presentable is because this is the coming out party for the first of the Power7-based servers from Big Blue.

In enterprise computing environments, batch jobs and file transfers often go hand in hand. Before a batch job can run, the latest data must be loaded, or jobs are setup to automatically execute when data arrives in a specific folder. Job scheduling software developer Help/Systems realized this affinity with the latest release of its cross-platform job scheduler Robot/SCHEUDLE Enterprise, which gains the capability to automate file transfers among i/OS, Unix, Linux, and Windows servers via FTP or FTPS.

There is an understandable amount of cynicism among the AS/400 faithful that IBM has neglected the OS/400 operating system, stealing all the best goodies from OS/400 and weaving them into AIX and then not adding some nifty features, such as live partition mobility for PowerVM, to i/OS, the modern instantiation of OS/400. Moreover, i/OS releases are anything but regular and Big Blue doesn't roll up dot releases like other operating system makers do.

One of the challenges facing enterprise computing architects is how to manage and coordinate an IT infrastructure that spreads from the organization's data center to one or more software as a service (SaaS) or cloud computing providers. For job scheduling software developer UC4 Software, which recently announced its UC4 Agent for Web Services, the answer is found through the magic of Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA).

I've done big boxes, and little boxes, and in-between boxes in my theoretical and completely hypothetical System iWant, 2010 Edition, Power7-based machines. As I sit down to write the next installment in the System iWant series, IBM is getting ready to launch some kind of Power7-based servers on February 8, and as far as I know, blades are not part of the announcement. So I feel perfectly comfortable in giving Big Blue whatever advice I can come up with to make its Power7 blades better.

Printer manufacturer Source Technologies recently announced that it has added support for the Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) protocol to the ST9620, one of its newest and most popular magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) multi-function laser printers. The Charlotte, North Carolina, company says that adding IPDS support will make the ST9620, which can print at speeds up to 40 pages per minute, an attractive printer for transactional print jobs at small and remote offices of companies that use the System i.

Sam Palmisano hasn't changed much over the years. From his photos, IBM's president, chief executive officer, and chairman appears to be a slightly larger version of his former self--a middle-aged man with a round, boyish face and a soft body; a stranger to physical exertion. Granted, as an executive he isn't paid to chop wood, but I was hoping for a little more mental exertion than was evident in his recent Newsweek column, The Future of the City.

Imperva, a developer of integrated security tools that monitors users and transactions from the application to the database level, next month is planning on supporting the System i server and its DB2/400 database with its SecureSphere suite of products. The company is tapping the System i security expertise of Raz-Lee Security for the development of SecureSphere Agent for DB2/400, the companies announced yesterday.

On January 25, IBM's PartnerWorld organization officially began operating Software Value Plus, a new plan that aims to match experienced IBM business partners with customers looking to install particular IBM software products. While the plan will impose new restrictions on which partners can sell what products--rarely a popular move among loyal business partners--on launch day IBM sweetened the deal with new sales incentives and training and certification programs targeting cloud computing.

Warehouse managers and salesmen will be able to check on inventory levels and other key pieces of information from the mobile comfort of their smartphones with the latest release of dcLINK from Data Systems International (DSI).

It's either feast or famine in the processor racket, and this week will see two server chips being announced and others being previewed for launch later in the quarter. All of the new chips coming out have their enthusiasts--some will even buy systems that use them!--and each chip will find its niche or volumes, as the case may be, despite the homogenization pressure in the systems sector.

In my mind, you can't beat our database. It's not only integrated into the operating system, it's also incredibly flexible. You can use SQL to create and access data just like databases on other systems but you can also use the native DDS, RPG, COBOL and other languages with the same data. No other database out there--not even other members of the DB2 family--has that kind of flexibility. It is currently known as DB2 for i, but I think most of us just think of it as "the database," which is appropriate because, unlike just about every other system out there, our platform only has one serious option for a database.

Information Builders last week announced the general availability of WebFOCUS RStat version 1.2, a new release of its software for building data mining and predictive analytics applications. The software doesn't run on the System i server, but, like most Information Builder's products, it can access data residing on that platform.

I had an unusual experience recently and thought other readers of Four Hundred Guru might also find it of interest. A physical file had no active records and three deleted records. We were trouble-shooting a problem and needed to know what data was in the three deleted records. We have two third-party products that are supposed to retrieve deleted records, but they failed us. Here's what we did.

The people behind the Four Hundred stack of newsletters live and work all over the country, and that means email and instant messaging are our equivalents of the water cooler. It is where we talk about what we are up to both personally and professionally, and it is also where we deal with the smaller issues that are facing us and can be solved without a phone call. (Both email and IM are essentially free, and Guild Companies is frugal.) Like many of you out there in AS/400 Land, we are confused about how to talk about the platform. Here's an exchange between the editors that we thought you would find interesting.

On February 1, 2010, some i/OS V5R3Mx, V5R4Mx, and V6R1Mx systems lost their ability to call IBM service. On that date, IBM changed some of the Host Names and IP Addresses that i/OS systems use to automatically call service via ECS and ESA. As a result, many iSeries, System i, and Power i systems can no longer automatically contact service unless certain PTFs are installed. Was your system affected?