• The PHP Community Starts the PHP 4 Sunset, Gears Up for PHP 6

  February 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The community behind the PHP scripting language that controls much of the Web application infrastructure out there on the Internet and on corporate networks has been evolving for a number of years. And now PHP 4, the language that put Zend Technologies on the map and was replaced two years ago by PHP 5, is being sunsetted by the PHP community. PHP 5.2 is the products customers need to be using as they ready for PHP 5.3 this year and PHP 6 next year. PHP 5 was a pretty bold upgrade, with object oriented programming and Web services built in,

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• Net Neutrality Comes Around on the Ferris Wheel Again

  February 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If at first, second, third, or fourth you don’t succeed, try, try again. Representative Ed Markey, the Democratic Congressman who hails from the 7th District of Massachusetts tech corridor around Boston, has introduced yet another bill that seeks to give some clarity about how traffic will be shaped–or not shaped–by the telecommunications companies and services providers that are the backbone of the Internet. In a bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 (HR5353), Markey and co-sponsor Republican Congressman Chip Pickering of the Third District of Mississippi, propose adding a new section to the Communications Act of 1934, which

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• Consumer Technologies Help Smaller Business, Yankee Finds

  February 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Ever since IBM introduced the first personal computers almost 30 years ago, the consumer has been driving the development of computing technologies. This trend has been especially evident among the smaller businesses that adopted PCs and PC servers to automate their businesses, but it’s also had an impact on corporations that buy big honking servers. But a new study by the Yankee Group aims to shed some light on the new class of consumer technologies, and how they help drive employee productivity at small and mid size businesses. According to the Yankee Group, SMB technologies like blogs, wikis, smart phones,

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• IBS Has Strong Software License and System i Sales in Q4

  February 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Swedish ERP application software maker International Business Systems is one of the largest remaining independent software companies that has not been snapped up by a larger player. The company closed out the final quarter of 2007 with strong software license sales and System i hardware sales, but services sales were down a bit, which impacted top line sales and profits in the quarter. And, perhaps most significantly, restructuring moves taken in 2006 and 2007 have yet to yield their full intended effects on the bottom line. Sweden is still using its own currency, the krona, which is abbreviated SEK, so

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• Lawson Partnership Expands Food Industry Apps to Livestock Management

  February 18, 2008 Dan Burger

  Specialized application software and rock-solid reliability was what made the IBM AS/400 a legendary server for so many mid-sized companies around the world. Companies like Lawson Software played a big role in the successes through the years, with ERP applications that were well-suited for specific niches. Food and beverage is one. That industry has seen major operational changes such as mandated regulations in the food safety area and increasingly complex supply chain relationships involving large retail chain stores. It is also affected by fluctuating demand on a local, regional, and global scale. For more than 25 years, Lawson’s products have

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• Jack Henry Unfazed by Financial Market Woes in Fiscal Q2

  February 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maybe sometimes it is not so bad to be a midrange company and to serve customers in credit unions and savings and loan banks. Financial application software and System i hardware vendor Jack Henry & Associates has not seen much of an effect in its fiscal second quarter financial results from the global financial services meltdown associated with bad mortgages written in the United States. Jack Henry recently reported its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, ended December 31, booking $192.2 million in sales, up 15 percent, with gross profits of $84.8 million, up 16 percent. Costs

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• WDSC Is Out, Rational Developer for System i Is In

  February 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If it has not been made clear to you yet from our coverage of i5/OS V6R1, this is a big release. While prior releases have also been big in terms of bringing database clustering, integrated high availability plumbing, logical partitioning, an AIX runtime environment, support for Linux, or the WebSphere application server and development tools, just to name some big features from the past decade’s worth of OS/400 and i5/OS versions and releases, V6R1 is important in that it involves the rejiggering and repackaging of the application development toolset for the System i platform. As part of the announcements last

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• Q&A with MKS CEO Philip Deck: Automating the Automaters

  February 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Q&A with MKS CEO Philip Deck: Automating the Automaters As the chairman and chief executive officer of application lifecycle management software maker MKS, Philip Deck spends a lot of time thinking about how other people and his own company create and manage software. Deck joined the Canadian and publicly traded software firm in 1999 after running a company called Certicom, a maker of cryptographic hardware and software, but he is clearly at home in the ALM software space and clearly enjoys his job, as this interview shows. MKS, of course, was founded in 1984 as Mortice Kern Systems, and

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• The System i Loses One Big Account and a Mid-Sized One, Too

  February 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Somewhere, deep in the heart of Georgia, there is a System i sales rep whose is none too happy. And just a little further north, up in America’s capital, there is another sales rep who is also probably not feeling too chipper. Two long-time AS/400 shops–the billing operations of cellular phone service provider AT&T Wireless and the United States Mint, the division of the U.S. Treasury department that prints and sells money–are both rumored to be ditching their iSeries and System i machines for alternative platforms. First, the smaller i5/OS shop that IBM has let get away. That the

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• As I See It: Why IT Will Save the Economy

  February 11, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Explanation #1: Fifteen years ago, two college kids were jogging along the beach and, as they were passing a large clump of flotsam wrapped in ropes of kelp, they noticed something glinting in the sunlight. They stopped, looked, and one of them reached into the slimy mass and pulled out what appeared to be an ancient lamp. As is the custom with ancient lamps, the young man began to rub it vigorously. No sense in taking a chance; they’d feel pretty stupid if they passed up their opportunity to awaken the Genie. Sure enough, there was a sizeable puff of

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