• Forrester Says IT Spending Is Choppy Across Industries and Geographies

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like many of you who have been in the IT industry for a few decades, I watch the ebb and flow of IT spending as IT budgets meet the hard realities or thrilling exuberance of the business environments in particular industries and geographies. With the steady stream of bad economic news–I do not need to get into the litany, since I know all readers of The Four Hundred are informed citizens of the world–it is no surprise we are as jumpy as the economies we participate in. And, IT spending, according to a recent study from Forrester Research, reflects

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• As I See It: Get Ready to ROWE

  September 15, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Each generation holds beliefs about work that are forged by time and place. Some are accepted without question, others are repeated with sufficient frequency that they become hard-coded in the collective consciousness. For example, people who lived through the Great Depression believed that nothing could be more important than having a job. As the Depression gave way to the post war economic ramp-up, people were able to secure a single job that spanned an entire career. But when the pace of prosperity quickened, people came to believe that job-hopping was the way to accelerate their earning potential. By the time

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• IBM Rolls Out WebSphere and Web Enablement for i V7.0

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue last week put a new version of its WebSphere Application Server middleware, V7.0 to be specific, into the field for its various server platforms and for those of several of its competitors. In addition to the updated WebSphere middleware, which has a cornucopia of Java enhancements and all the Web 2.0 buzzwords you can stomach, IBM announced its companion set of freebie extensions for WebSphere, called Web Enablement for i, at the V7.0 level as well. With WebSphere Application Server V7.0, IBM is delivering full support for the Java EE 5 standard and has certified that it has

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• Survive, Adapt, Repeat: IT Jungle Shutting Down Non-AS/400 Newsletters

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some stories are harder to write than others, and this one will go down as one of the most difficult stories that I have had to do in a long time. No life, no career, and no company is without its risks and challenges, and every person or organization has to continually assess what is going on around them and deal with what is while keeping an eye on whatever dreams and plans they might have. And so it has been for myself and my team with regard to the IT Jungle. My team and I came together in our

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• Arrow and IBM to Chase Deals Together in Poland

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server maker IBM and one of its two key master resellers, Arrow Electronics, have joined forces to try to take a concerted effort to push servers and storage into SMB shops into Poland. The deal, which involves the Enterprise Computing Solutions group at Arrow and IBM’s Power Systems division, allows Arrow ESC to peddle the full Power Systems i Edition and AIX and Linux Edition machines, as well as their System i and System p predecessors (which is important for upgrade deals) into Poland through a reseller channel. Arrow, you will remember, significantly expanded its presence in Europe back

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• Disk Array and Storage Software Sales Up Smartly in the Second Quarter

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While certain parts of the server market in specific geographies have been hit by economic pressures, price competition, and deal deferrals in recent months, thus putting downward pressure on shipment and revenue growth in the server space, disk arrays and related storage software have thus far been growing like everything is still right with the world. The second quarter, according to the analysts at IDC, was another good one for disk array makers. IDC reckons that external disk array sales rose by 16.7 percent in Q2, hitting $5.1 billion, and that total disk sales rose by a more modest

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• Volvo IT Partners to Operate ERP Apps for IBS Customers

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you like the ERP software created by Swedish company International Business Systems but you don’t want to mess around with supporting the systems that run it, then IBS has an interesting services partner for you: Volvo IT, the IT services arm of the Swedish car maker of the same name. Last week, IBS, one of the few remaining free-standing ERP software makers that has a strong presence in the OS/400, i5/OS, and i platform, announced that it has tapped fellow countryman Volvo IT to provide operational support services for the IBS ERP suite. Volvo IT is to Volvo as

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• The BladeCenter S Gets a New SAS RAID Disk Module

  September 15, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM wants small and medium businesses to adopt the blade server form factor, but the storage options available for blades are not really appropriate for SMB shops. On-blade disk capacity is limited to one or two drives, which means the blade cannot support lots of file capacity and certainly is inappropriate for supporting anything but the most ridiculously modest level of online transaction processing; and storage area networking is well beyond the budget of SMB shops, and a bit like killing a gnat with a cast iron frying pan. This is one reason why IBM has announced a SAS module

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• The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  September 10, 2008 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us–although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away! RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. There are many good reasons to use these fields, but in

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• SQL Assist: Powerful Interactive SQL

  September 10, 2008 Skip Marchesani

  The Run SQL Scripts function, a.k.a. the SQL Script Center or Script Center, is System i Navigator’s counterpart to Interactive SQL on the green screen side of the System i. The SQL Script Center allows the user to execute all or a subset of a script that contains one or more SQL statements and/or batch CL commands. It is part of the Navigator Database function and is an extremely powerful and flexible tool with lots of function that can have a very positive impact on application developer productivity. Interactive SQL has a very good multilevel SQL prompter that supports a

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