• Happy 18th Birthday, AS/400; Time to Leave the Nest

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, it is a pity that turning 18 years of age does not, in some ways, give the Application System/400, which is now called the System i, some rights of its own that transcend that of its parent, IBM. When we turn 18 in the United States, we can vote and we can join the military, but we still can’t drink legally, even though a lot of us certainly drink against the law. Maybe it is time for the System i to stand up for itself and, in a very real way, against the way that IT

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• System i Helps Catholic Charities Spend Its Money on the Needy

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the IT business these days, vendors talk a lot about doing more with less, and while having a lower total cost of ownership is a big deal, it generally means that some small company or big corporation now has more money to play with, and it doesn’t generally directly impinge on the lives of people. Not so with OS/400 shop Catholic Charities, which is a non-profit located in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis in the home state of the AS/400, iSeries, and System i. Catholic Charities served 1.1 million meals to hungry people last year and

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• IBM Launches System i Laboratory in South America

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  According to reports in the local newspapers, IBM Uruguay has spent $500,000 to open what it called an iSeries Laboratory, the first such lab of its kind apparently to serve those countries in the “Southern Cone” region of South America. The report did not say much more than this–you can check it out here and test your Spanish skills–but it did mention two local vendors by name: ARTech, which is based in Montevideo and which sells its software in its home country as well as in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, has created a set of

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• Magic Software Sells Off CRM Application Business

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Magic Software, a provider of development and application integration tools for the OS/400 market, last week said that it has sold off its customer relationship management software assets to another company, called eContact Software. Magic Software announced its CRM software in August 2001 in an effort to latch on to the craze for CRM software at the time. Remember when Siebel Systems was the next best thing to SAP? There were many players in the CRM space, and the people behind eContact Software, which appears to be a new company, plan to use it as a front end to

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• Middleware Sales Continue to Grow in 2005, IBM Still the King

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The analysts at Gartner say that the market for application integration and middleware software is experiencing a lot of upheavals, with big architecture changes and lots of vendors entering and leaving the market, but that despite all that turmoil, the market managed to grow by 7.1 percent to reach a total of $8.5 billion in sales. IBM, which used to be neck-and-neck with BEA Systems with each of them having about a third revenue share, has continued to grow at the market’s pace, and has been able to take dominant market share. However, even still, IBM’s share of the

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• Happy 18th Birthday, AS/400; Time to Leave the Nest

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, it is a pity that turning 18 years of age does not, in some ways, give the Application System/400, which is now called the System i, some rights of its own that transcend that of its parent, IBM. When we turn 18 in the United States, we can vote and we can join the military, but we still can’t drink legally, even though a lot of us certainly drink against the law. Maybe it is time for the System i to stand up for itself and, in a very real way, against the way that IT

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• Windows Patches Kill Operations Console on V5R3 and V5R4

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A warning from the OS/400 community: According to a number of people who applied patches to their Windows machines last week, as Microsoft instructed them to patch on Tuesday, as soon as their patches were applied, the operations console links into their OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 systems stopped working. Jeff Crosby reported his troubled with “Mikeysoft” patches and operations console relating to i5/OS V5R4 on the Midrange-L user group, while Thomas Hauber reported problems with the Windows Update and the operations console linking into OS/400 V5R3 over at the comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc newsgroup. As IBM’s iSeries Operation Console site explains,

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• The X Factor: Virtual Server Sprawl

  June 19, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to find a server maker who is not gung-ho about virtualization these days. This might seem a bit perplexing, given that one of the main marketing drivers for virtual machine partitioning or logical partitioning on modern servers is that by carving up a physical machine into virtual, dynamic slices, customers can do server consolidation on a grand scale, and in theory reduce their footprints. Of course, not everyone is thinking about server virtualization in this manner. At data centers in the financial services sector, for instance, IT departments are operating in a business environment where transaction volumes

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• OS/400 Shops Share Their Training Experiences

  June 19, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Last week, I explained that many OS/400 shops are preparing for (if not already experiencing) a shortage of trained resources on the platform. As AS/400 and iSeries stalwarts head toward retirement, and colleges are turning out fewer and fewer students who have experience with much other than Windows or Linux systems, users are looking to build their own RPG programmers and system administrators. In the prior article I examined some of the alternatives that users have for training new programmers to support those business critical legacy systems. This week, I’ll look at what a few users have to say about

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• OS/400 V5R3 PTFs Can Corrupt Licensed Internal Code

  June 19, 2006 Doug Bidwell

  Unlike many of you, I spend a great deal of time–some would say an inordinate amount of time–dealing with PTFs for the OS/400 and i5/OS operating systems. And even a techie like me gets burned every now and then. Be careful with Cumulative Group PTF C6101530, which I call “cume” 6101 for short. If you follow the current installation instructions that are online at IBM‘s Fix Central site, you will be OK. But if you follow the instructions that ship with the PTF order, you could in trouble. The basic problem is that IBM issued from PTFs, and they

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