• SystemObjects Lets You Generate iPad Apps from IBM i

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Here’s a prediction that’s easy to make: The surge of interest in smart phones and tablets that we saw in 2012 will continue into 2013 and beyond. With demand for mobile computing firmly in place, the rush is on for IBM i software vendors to create mobile interface development tools for IBM i. One IBM i software vendor that wants a piece of the mobile action is the French company SystemObjects, which recently launched a new mobile application development tool called SmartPad4i. SystemObjects built its reputation with an AS/400 version of the Delphi RAD tool called Delphi/400, and has

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• Respect My Authority Swapper, Halcyon Says

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Halcyon Software has added new features to its Authority Swapper product that will garner the respect of users in IBM i shops everywhere. Now, when an IBM i user swaps into a powerful user profile to accomplish a task, every screen in the session is diligently recorded by the product, providing an un-contestable trail of the user’s activity while they had the elevated authority. Halcyon unveiled the Authority Swapper two years ago to address concerns about users with elevated authority and the potential abuses that could stem from those powers. Instead of permanently granting users such special authorities as ALLOBJ

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• ARCAD Goes Unicode with ALM, Looks to Asia for Growth

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  ARCAD Software has achieved Unicode compliance with version 9 of its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, thereby enabling the French company to address new markets for its IBM i software, particularly China and Japan. ARCAD says the new version is a major milestone for the product, and provides a foundation on which to build new capabilities in the future. Achieving Unicode compliance with ARCAD’s entire suite is a major milestone for the company, ARCAD CEO Philippe Magne tells IT Jungle. The effort took two years, and required changing 75 percent of the code that underlies the IBM i change

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• IT Shops Buy 7.1 Exabytes Of Disk Array Capacity In Q3

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to break into the disk array business, you better have a strong stomach and a steel spine. It takes more and more capacity to make a little more money, and it is the most competitive part of the IT sector these days. According to the box counters at IDC, disk array sales were up 3.7 percent to $7.87 billion in the third quarter, but to get that revenue, vendors had to push 7,104 petabytes–that’s more than 7 exabytes–of new disk capacity. This is the first time that quarter disk array sales have broken through 7 exabytes,

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• IBM Canada Sweetens Education And Training Deal

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue’s subsidiary in the Great White North not only wants you to build your IT skills, it wants to make a little dough helping you do it. But sometimes, if you want to get a little, you have to give a little. And so IBM Canada is offering customers who pre-pay for training slightly higher discounts if they pony up bigger wads of cash–enumerated in loonies, not greenbacks–over the next several months. In announcement letter ENUS312-137, IBM is offering customers who spend between $25,000 or more on Education Packs a 15 percent discount off that training. Under the

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• Tech-Business Skills in Demand, Academic Initiative Expands

  December 10, 2012 Dan Burger

  Developing new technology skills and being better prepared for future job opportunities will keep IT workers and those aspiring to become IT professionals busy these days. According to the just released 2012 IBM Tech Trends Report, 10 percent of the managers surveyed believe their organizations are inadequately staffed due to a lack of technology skills mixed with business skills. To address that situation, IBM has re-purposed its Academic Initiative program, which includes a Power Systems element. Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on headliner type topics such as big data, analytics, digital marketing, mobile computing, and security. Educational materials

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• Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone. What the two companies certainly agree on is that the server market is under pressure, and particularly in the non-X86 portions of the market as most midrange and high-end server makers are in

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• Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, thank heavens, we made it. The holiday season is upon us and it could not have come a moment later as far as I am concerned. Every year has its challenges, and here’s to hoping that 2013 is better and a bit easier for us all. I am thankful that I will be able push my keyboard aside and walk away from the desk for a bit. After a year of writing, I have a pretty acute case of word poisoning, as anyone copy editing me, reading my stories in the past few months, and my family and friends

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• IT Spending To Increase In 2013, World Ascends To The Third Platform

  December 10, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  The overall global financial outlook for 2013 is cause for concern. Many countries in Europe are heading into recession, and in the United States we are driving toward the fiscal cliff that threatens to send us plummeting into a second Great Recession. But lest we believe our financial woes are the only thing that binds our planet together, the folks at IDC say the world is in the middle of a technology shift that occurs only once every 25 years, and they are making some predictions for next year that indicate our addiction to electronic gadgetry is a worldwide phenomenon.

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• As I See It: Still Buoyant After All These Years

  December 10, 2012 Victor Rozek

  IT is a buoyant profession. It stays afloat in turbulent economic waters. Just in the last four years, it has weathered recession, high unemployment, offshoring, outsourcing, looming austerity, and two rounds of quantitative easing courtesy of Ben Bernanke. (Quantitative easing is a banker’s euphemism for printing tons of money with little benefit to anyone but the bankers.) Nonetheless, it appears the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. If so, IT remains the one indispensable asset across all sectors and enterprises. Consider that during the ravages of Sandy, not every business was able to save its inventory, but you

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