• IBM i Top Concerns: Build Skills, Add High Availability, Serve Users

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As this newsletter so aptly demonstrates, you don’t have to be an IBM i shop to be intimately interconnected with the IBM i community and therefore have your own concerns about the health and wealth of the platform. The community is dominated by users, of course, but software developers, consultants, resellers, IBMers, and wiseguys like reporters and analysts all have skin in the game, and they voiced their opinions in the latest Top Concerns survey performed by COMMON Europe. First of all, for all of you who participated in this year’s Top Concerns survey, the seventh of which closed

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• Superstorm Sandy Puts DR Plans To The Ultimate Test

  November 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

  When Superstorm Sandy roared ashore a week ago, residents of the Northeast knew they would be in for a wild ride. Sandy didn’t disappoint, as she brought a record storm surge to the New York City area and devastated the Jersey Shore. The storm also poked hurricane-sized holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of some businesses, like those that placed backup generators in flood-prone areas. For some IBM i shops and managed service providers (MSPs), DR plans were strained but not broken, and gained the Sandy stamp of approval for good DR housekeeping. Before Sandy made landfall as a

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• Rumors Say JDA Software Slaps On For Sale Sign

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a very expansive, exciting, and sometimes exasperating couple of years for JDA Software, which has shored up its revenues streams and customer bases in retail and supply chain management software through a bunch of acquisitions, as well as losing a costly lawsuit against a big customer and having to restate its financials. Now, there are rumors going around Wall Street that JDA, which is a publicly held company, might have put itself up for sale. The rumors broke in a story from Reuters on October 29, just as Hurricane Sandy was preparing to punch the Mid-Atlantic

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Estranged Here In A Strained Land

  November 5, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  “Kafka,” said my doctor, checking for existential and inguinal strains. I was in satisfactory shape, he observed, which is more than one can say about Dell or Hewlett-Packard. Dell’s eponymous chief Michael is straining in vain to lift sales and profits; the way things are going he could end up with a financial hernia. Meg Whitman, HP’s boss, has similar difficulties; she might suffer a fiscal hisnia. I’m probably late pointing this out, because this very topic became the cover of the October 20 Barron’s magazine, and usually cautious Barron’s is more often a coincident reporter or

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• Testing For Success Sometimes Doomed To Failure

  November 5, 2012 Yvonne Enselman

  As my position has shifted from being a programmer to a tester, I have not lost interest in the IBM i world. How the platform functions and what trends drive development remain relevant to my job. If I don’t understand it, I can’t test it. While I find information that helps me grasp what the techies are doing, it is difficult to find information relevant to other teams in our i-focused publications. It’s time to start talking about application testing for IBM i developers and other IBM i professionals who don’t understand why platform matters. Starting from the developer point

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• Michigan LUG Members Face Reality-Based Web Query Training

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  There may be no better example of what a local user group should be than the educational programs run out of the Southeast Michigan iSeries Users Group. Last week, SMiUG and the Western Michigan IBM i User Group rolled up their sleeves and got to work on a project that is bringing together 37 members for a hands-on, learn-by-doing IBM Web Query experience. It will be a month-long, problem-solving exercise with the goal of completing two real-world projects for a pair of companies looking for modern query capabilities that include dashboards, drill-downs, and mobile components including iPhones and iPads.

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• Arrow Boosts ECS Sales Despite System Slowdown In Q3

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite an expected and somewhat abrupt drop off in server sales in the third quarter that most IT suppliers experienced, master reseller Arrow Electronics was nonetheless able to boost its sales of software and storage to compensate and post growth in its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group in the third quarter. However, overall revenues took a hit and profits took an even bigger dive in the quarter thanks to falling margins in ECS and components and falling revenues in components. In the quarter ended in September, Arrow had $4.96 billion in revenues, down 4.3 percent. Net income at the company

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• Agilysys Makes Dough From Hospitality And Services

  November 5, 2012 Dan Burger

  Led by an economic exclamation point in its hospitality business dominated by hotels and casinos, Agilysys found a way to make some revenue gains during the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 year ended in September. Agilysys reported a 9 percent year-over-year gain in its hospitality segment, which allowed the company to post a net revenue gain of 3 percent. A retail segment that was off 1 percent from the same quarter one year ago was a bit of drag total revenue, which inched ahead to $54.2 million. A summary of the first six months of 2013 shows the hospitality

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• IBM Pushes Moore’s Law Limits With Carbon Nanotube Transistors

  November 5, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Silicon-based chip etching technologies are going to reach the lower limits of the atomic scale at some point, and chip equipment and chip designers are all looking out ahead into the future to try to come up with new technologies that will extend or replace current silicon-based chips so out electronics will get faster, more capacious, and less expensive over time, tracking with Moore’s Law. Scientists working at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, offer one possible tweak to current technology, having come up with a technique that will create chips based on carbon nanotubes, which offer better performance

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• Paging Doctor Watson

  November 5, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Last week, we told you about IBM‘s Watson supercomputer heading to college, and now comes news that Watson has aspirations in the medical field. While it is unlikely that Watson will be seeing patients any time soon, IBM researchers want to focus on Watson’s question answering technology, which enables the Jeopardy! champ to analyze the meaning and context of human language and quickly find important correlations between facts buried within huge volumes of data, ultimately assisting healthcare workers to make better decisions about patient care. Performing differential diagnosis–the kind of thing that House MD does with a mean

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