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Power7+ Chips Juiced With Faster Clocks, Memory Compression
August 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I have my ticket booked to head west to the Hot Chips 24 conference hosted by Stanford University, where IBM, Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel are expected to talk about just announced and impending processors. But Big Blue seems unable to contain its enthusiasm for the Power7+ chip that it will talk about alongside its next-generation zNext processors for its System z mainframes.
A little more than a month ago, I told you about some of the details on the forthcoming chip that could be scrounged from poking around the Intertubes. From a die shot of
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Windows On The (2012 And Cloudy) World
July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Incumbents in any business, whether it is in the technology sector or not, are usually pretty good at seeing an opportunity off on the horizon and at looking around in their immediate vicinity and identifying and dealing with direct competition. What kills them, in the long run, is their inability to see an indirect threat that can morph into a something quite deadly indeed, and even if they should see the threat, they are unable to stop doing what they are doing, selling their products, and come up with an alternative strategy.
This has certainly been the case in the
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Krengel Challenges Shops to Keep UPS Shipping Apps on IBM i
July 10, 2012 Alex Woodie
Krengel Technology is currently offering 20 hours of free custom development to IBM i shops that reject the free UPS shipping program called WorldShip, and implement its IBM i-based Krengelship instead. Considering the UPS product is free, and Krengelship costs thousands of dollars, one wonders whether this offer really holds water. But as the adoption of Krengelship by logistics business Jacobson Companies shows, there are other costs to consider besides licensing.
WorldShip is UPS’ high-end shipping software for organizations with a large volume of shipments or pickups with UPS (or at least 25 per day, according to the company). The
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JD Edwards Users Pondering Upgrade Options
June 18, 2012 Dan Burger
The Southern California JD Edwards user group (JDE SCUG) gathered last Wednesday for one of their quarterly collaboration sessions. It gave me an opportunity to talk with someone on the front lines working with a subset of customers that have the same or very similar IT dilemmas as everyone else, except that in this case, we’re talking about IBM i shops where the mix of Oracle and IBM can sometimes be volatile.
Steven Colgrove is the senior director of the west region for Denovo, an application and technology consulting company specializing in helping companies running JD Edwards
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DB2 For i XMLTABLE, Part 1: Convert XML to Tabular Data
June 13, 2012 Michael Sansoterra
DB2 for i 7.1 brought many new features including the ability to compose and decompose XML data. However, decomposing an XML document in DB2 for i 7.1 requires quite a few steps and creates, sometimes unwanted, permanent objects. Further, for all of the XML processing features, one lacking feature is the ability to easily and dynamically shred XML. Fortunately, that missing feature is now present with the technology refresh 4 update, which adds the XMLTABLE table function to the SQL developer’s arsenal. In this article, part 1 of my series on DB2 for i, we will look at how
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IBM Puffs Up New Public, Private SmartCloud Releases
June 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Just like any other product, public and private clouds have to change and evolve to get more relevant and to keep pace with the competition. IBM has made a lot of promises with its SmartCloud private cloud infrastructure, which you install in your data center to create virtual cloudy server and storage slices, and its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ clouds, which Big Blue launched a little more than a year ago and said it would flesh out a bit more.
With a bunch of announcements just before the Memorial Day holiday here in the United States, IBM is making good
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Modernization and Mobile Lead BCD Development Efforts
May 15, 2012 Dan Burger
Whether working from ground zero or building on existing investments, BCD‘s application development products have long been used by IBM midrange shops. One of the reasons is BCD’s continual investment in developing its product lineup, which handles everything from quick green-screen Web-enablement to multi-platform Web development. And for companies unfamiliar with BCD, here’s a surprise–the company has a newly enhanced business intelligence tool as well.
Most IBM i shops are talking about application modernization projects. And each year there are more of these projects deployed. The majority are quick and simple transformations of green-screen apps to Web apps. And
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Profound Declares Platform Independence Day
May 8, 2012 Dan Burger
How do you transform application modernization from something that appeals to techno geeks who love the challenge of coding magic into something that gets the attention of the C-level executives with the big picture business plans? Make it simple and make it platform independent. And let them know the in-house IT skills can handle the job. That pretty much sums up what Profound Logic has done with its latest release of Profound UI.
Credit the product development team at Profound with its continual efforts in adding enhancements to its tools for building Web and mobile applications as well as modernizing
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Halcyon Ships Document Management Software, Updates 2 Others
May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie
Halcyon Software yesterday unveiled its Document Management System, a new product designed to streamline the creation, distribution, and archiving of content from IBM i servers and help customers move to a paperless office. The vendor also used the COMMON conference taking place this week in Anaheim, California, as a springboard to launch new versions of its job scheduler and system monitoring tool for the IBM i server.
Document Management System 3.0
Halcyon’s new Document Management System gives users a way to transform raw IBM i spool file content into more refined-looking documents. Once the spool files have been transformed, they
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Mad Dog 21/21: Gun-bae, Google, And Thanks For All The Tuna
May 7, 2012 Hesh Wiener
In late April, Google started selling the Galaxy Nexus GSM mobile phone from its Play Store, the website that dispenses Android applications. The Nexus is a developers’ phone. When it first became officially available in the United States last November in a CDMA variation sold exclusively through Verizon it was aimed at app developers who wanted an Android 4 platform. But then Google realized that it had overlooked another market, and a very important one at that: web creators. Now Google and its manufacturing partner Samsung are scrambling to educate site builders about the promise of yakju and takju on