• Another Look At .NET Apps Accessing IBM i

  July 23, 2012 Dan Burger

  Beauty and ease of multi-platform integration are in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes it’s the same vision. For instance, if you are a Microsoft .NET application developer and you are able to grab data residing on the DB2 for i database with the greatest of ease, it’s a beautiful thing. But it’s certainly no guarantee. Subject matter experts like Craig Pelkie and Derek Maciak find people lost in this integration wilderness on a pretty regular basis. Not everyone is happy with the .NET and IBM i matchup. I wrote an article on this topic about six weeks ago, and

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• Big Blue Cranks Up The Profit Engine In Q2

  July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You have to hand it to IBM. The major economies that used to lead the global economic engine are having a bit of trouble with the growth markets coming on, and being that International is in fact the company’s first name and Business is its middle name, you would expect for Big Blue to not worry about where it makes its sales or even if sales grow so long as profits do. And that is exactly what the company has focused on and accomplished in the second quarter. In the quarter ended in June, IBM’s revenues took a $1

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• IBM Gives Killer Power System Deals Down Under

  July 23, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking to buy a Power 720 or 750 server based on the current Power7 processors and your company happens to be located in either Australia or New Zealand, then IBM has a deal that you are probably going to want to take a look at and maybe not even refuse. Maybe IBM will start wheeling and dealing up here in the Northern Hemisphere soon, too, ahead of the Power7+ launch. As you all know, the vast majority of customers who run IBM i on modern Power Systems machines find that a single-socket Power 720 is sufficient for

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• SAP Pre-Announces Record Q2 Revenues

  July 16, 2012 Dan Burger

  Infor with its shopping list of IBM i-centric ERP businesses earns more than SAP in this niche. Thanks to its JD Edwards business, so does Oracle. But SAP is still the biggest of those fish in the ocean, it has thousands of IBM i installations, and its quarterly financial reports are eagerly awaited by the stock market mongers. And once again, SAP is eager to show off its record catch. Let’s begin by noting this was the company’s best revenue-generating Q2 in history. A currency-adjusted 19 percent gain in software revenues put a snap in SAP’s step to the

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• Ultrium Tape Drive Makers Ready LTO 6 Units

  July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Linear Tape Out (LTO) Consortium managed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum started selling LTO 6 licenses last June, and now the first tape drives based on the spec are about to hit the market. According to a statement put out by the consortium, the first LTO 6 drives will hit the market in August, with the ability to store up to 6.25 TB of compressed data on a cartridge, double of the LTO 5 cartridge, with data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/sec on compressed data, a 42.9 per cent boost over LTO 5. If you

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• Scott Klement Joins Profound Logic Staff

  July 16, 2012 Dan Burger

  Like the Dos Equis beer commercials featuring “the most interesting man in the world,” Scott Klement just might be “the most interesting man in the RPG world.” At the end of the beer commercials, the star always says, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” I picture Klement wrapping up his COMMON conference sessions or webinars by saying “Stay thirsty, my RPG friends.” Makes sense given his personal thirst for RPG. That thirst for expanding his knowledge and experience has led him to joining the staff of Profound Logic, the IBM i application development and modernization tool vendor based in Dayton, Ohio.

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• IBM Launches Single-Socket PowerLinux Server, Tweaks Power Systems I/O

  July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is fleshing out its PowerLinux line of Linux-only servers, and last week put out a variant of the Power 730 box with a single socket and a lower price tag than the current two-socket boxes that were announced back in April along with a PowerLinux version of a two-socket Flex System node. Last week, in announcement letter 112-119, you will see that the PowerLinux 7R1 is a single-socket server in a 2U rack-mounted server chassis. You get precisely one processor option: an eight-core Power7 chip running at 3.55 GHz with all of its cores activated to accept

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• Continued Caution Sways 2012 Worldwide Spending Re-Forecast

  July 16, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  The analysts at Gartner continue to re-evaluate their worldwide IT spending predictions for 2012, and while the news is still better than last year, it’s not the economic recovery and bump in IT spending that we’ve all been hoping for. “While the challenges facing global economic growth persist–the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China–the outlook has at least stabilized,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement covering the latest IT spending update. “There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is

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• One More Power Systems Roadmap For The Road

  July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through some Power processor and systems roadmaps that I was able to find out there on the Intertubes, as well as some specifics about the forthcoming Power7+ processors, which are due to come to market between now and the end of the year. I accidentally left one of the roadmaps I stumbled upon out of last week’s story. And it is an important one. So this week, I will show it to you. Check it out: For Power Systems shops, the fact that there is Power8 and Power9

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Up Close And Personal

  July 16, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  When Google unveiled the Nexus 7 tablet computer in June, it couldn’t make calls over a cellular phone network but it could beam financial transactions about a half-inch. The Nexus 7 has a secure data radio based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Nowadays NFC is in a growing number of mobile devices, but that’s not all. NFC makes transit passes like London’s Oysters smart. It is baked into some debit and credit cards. And you can make your very own NFC devices for a buck a pop. They can do some neat tricks. There’s a lot more to NFC

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