• IBM and New York State Kick in $1.64 Billion for Chips

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM‘s chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM’s birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable. For its part, IBM is going to spend $1.5 billion over the

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• Gartner Pegs BI Software Sales at $5.1 Billion

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The business intelligence software space may not be the T-Rex of enterprise software like ERP systems have been, but it definitely qualifies as Brontosaurus, chewing cud to make a living rather than attacking competitors for the right to live. The BI software market has grown nicely over the past decade, but like other software markets, it has undergone a lot of consolidation and, in recent months, the U.S. market has been problematic. According to the latest statistics from Gartner, the global business intelligence software market (including maintenance and various support revenues for vendors) accounted for $5.1 billion in 2007,

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• Sun and IBM Deliver 1 TB Tape Drives, Argue About Speed

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The engineers and marketeers at Sun Microsystems worked hard to try to beat IBM to market with a new 1 TB tape drive, and they succeeded in the task last Monday by getting the T10000B tape drive out the door. But IBM was only one day behind Sun, and was so happy to point out that its TS1130 tape drive, also delivering cartridges with 1 TB of capacity, was faster. Sun’s T10000B comes, of course, from its StorageTek unit, which makes mainframe-class tape drives and libraries as well as disk arrays. And like the IBM unit, it offers 1 TB

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• API Fun Time

  July 16, 2008 Hey, Ted

  We have a job that is designed to run periodically to collect XML files from a third party via FTP. Rather than have a program that is constantly active, it was decided that the very first action of the program would be to re-submit itself to a single entry job queue with a scheduled run time derived from a maintainable value held on a file. The benefit of this approach is that if for some reason the program fails there is no need to worry about re-starting the process–unless of course the program failed at the self-submit stage! When an

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• Conditional Inserts with JDBC Prepared Statements

  July 16, 2008 Hey Mike

  I would like to write a conditional INSERT in SQL so I can use a prepared statement through JDBC. However, SQL supports IF only in SPL, the Stored Procedures Language. Is there another way to insert the record if doesn’t exist? –Avdhesh For the reader’s benefit, here is the SQL statement Avdhesh wants to run in JDBC: if not exists (select 1 from cotable where coekey = ?) then insert into cotable (coekey, cocode, coname, coactv) values (?, ?, ?, 1); end if Unfortunately DB2 for i5/OS doesn’t support dynamic scripting. Therefore conditional statements such as IF are not supported

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• Admin Alert: A Client Access Mystery Solved. . . with No-Prizes!!!

  July 16, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  In April, I introduced Rick, an admin with a Client Access problem. His 9406-720 AS/400 would not accept more than 70 5250 client sessions. Try as I might, I was unable to solve Rick’s issue. In desperation, I submitted the problem to my legions of readers (at least 50), offering a variation on a Marvel Comics’ No-Prize to anyone who could solve it. Here’s what happened. Part One: The Deluge of Answers Never in the history of Admin Alert (serving the Power i, iSeries, and AS/400 community since 2002) had I received so large a response to a single

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• 5250 Emulator for iPhone? Mochasoft is On It

  July 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  So you picked up one of those new cool new iPhones, and are browsing the Apple App Store for some awesome new apps to use during your commute. In addition to such highly desirable titles as Super Monkey Ball, Etch a Sketch, and Pac Man, you will soon find a 5250 terminal emulator in the online store, according to Mochasoft, the Danish software developer. Mochasoft is currently working on developing a 5250 emulator that runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, according to a statement on the Mochasoft Web site. It’s not known when the application will be

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• Companies Slow to Kick Paper Habit, But E-Docs Making the ROI Case

  July 15, 2008 Dan Burger

  During the past five to 10 years, the talk about offices going paperless has exceeded the reality. I guess you could say that about a lot of things. We live in hype-infested times. Still, we would like to think digital technology would have all but eliminated paper shufflers, paper cuts, and forests of file cabinets. Why haven’t digital documents taken over? In the IBM System i ecosystem the document management software business is very competitive, keeping prices low and providing plenty of options. Maybe the idea of completely “paperless offices” has set the bar too high. Many companies have completed

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• ACL Brings Real-Time Audit to Bear at Siemens

  July 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Siemens, the world’s largest SAP shop, is adopting audit software from ACL Services to analyze its purchase transactions and look for waste and fraud. The implementation, which will span 1,300 subsidiaries and other entities of the German technology giant–including 800 that use SAP and 500 that use some other ERP system–will be the world’s largest purchase-to-pay monitoring project ever undertaken, according to ACL. If you’re not a big fan of audits and the tools of the auditor’s trade, you may have never heard of ACL Services, a 20-year-old software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The firm specializes in

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• IBM Ends WebFacing in Host Integration Suite, Adds EGL

  July 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected. WebFacing, in fact, continues its role as screen modernization technology within IBM’s HIS. Please see “Correction: WebFacing Lives On, in HIS and HATS” for more details about the error. Developers will no longer be able to use the IBM WebFacing Tool to modernize their 5250 applications, if they obtained WebFacing through the Host Integration Solution (HIS) suite. As part of the delivery of Rational HIS for 5250 Applications version 7.1, IBM announced that HIS customers will be restricted to modernizing their applications using the Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), which converts legacy green-screen

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