The intermediate IBM i 6.1.1 version

I recently wrote about the next version of the IBM i operating system, formerly called i5/OS. It is due out next year. But in the meantime, IBM has come out with an intermediate version of IBM i 6.1.1. Once you get past all those decimal points, you may want to know what the heck it is, what it does, and why it might be useful to install.

For that we have Steve Will, the chief IBM i architect, who wrote about “What is This ‘.1′ Anyway?” for IBM Systems Magazine. Dawn May also writes about it in her post, “Install IBM i Over the Network.”

Several prominent speakers pull out of COMMON

Several prominent members of the System i community who usually give some of the best received presentations at COMMON user group meetings will not be doing that anymore, at least for the foreseeable future.

Jon Paris, Susan Gantner and Paul Tuohy are among the list of people who will pass on presenting at the COMMON show in Orlando next May. It is clear that COMMON’s recent cutbacks will have substantial effects on the look and feel of the show. Perhaps the biggest cut of all is COMMON’s decision to reduce compensation to volunteer speakers — whether that be in the form of a free registration, paying for travel and hotel, or other expenses. It certainly was one of the major factors that led to Paris’s and Ganter’s decision:

Had it not been for the need to examine our participation from a financial perspective, we would probably have continued on autopilot, delivering sessions along with our other volunteer duties, as we’ve done every time a COMMON conference rolled around. Being forced to think about whether we could afford to do that next year also caused us to think about why we were doing it in the first place and whether the time, money and energy we’ve been donating to COMMON represent the best way for us to help the community.

This weekend we found ourselves at the moment of truth, wrestling with the decision to either accept or decline our sessions that had been selected for the spring conference. We concluded that we still wanted to support the idea of COMMON, but increasingly it became apparent that the COMMON we wanted to support was an idealized organization that existed only in our minds. We had hoped the old COMMON could return and we worked with many other volunteers to make that a reality, but for whatever reasons COMMON’s direction seems to be set. For the time being we’ll remain members of COMMON and hope that things will change.

Paris and Gantner added that they won’t, by any means, just disappear from the System i landscape. They just plan to put their efforts into other System i educational and social endeavors, among them the Young i Professionals, iManifest, and local System i user groups.

Even those continuing to participate in COMMON shows realize the problems with the user group’s cutbacks to volunteers. Scott Klement, for example, will be going because Systemi Network is paying for him. But he said that he’s “not happy with COMMON’s attitude towards its volunteers, and (he) sincerely hope(s) they re-think their direction.”

Meanwhile, Don Rima, a longtime IBM midrange user who just recently started the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group, let loose:

Oh, I think that Jon and Susan are the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come not only from a presenter standpoint but from an attendee standpoint. And as much as I like Jon and Susan and as super as thier presentations are, I find it hard to believe that there’s NOBODY else out there that can do presentations on RPG, ILE…etc… Yet, it was absolutely shocking to find that there were NO sessions on RPG, ILE, CL or any of the other traditional “AS/400″ languages offered at IBM’s tech conf this past September.

And if COMMON continues to capitulate to IBM’s demands that it become a AIX user group, it will also go the way of User Blue – even though User Blue had alot of help in its demise from SHARE, IMHO.

 

 

RPG Open I/O in IBM i 6.1.1 and 7.1

After attending the RPG & DB2 summit in October 2009, Profound Logic founder, Alex Roytman, got interested in some of the features that will be released in the upcoming versions of the IBM i operating system. Roytman is joined by Philip Roestamadji, marketing director at Profound Logic, and they discuss what they learned about RPG Open I/O. Two highlights include the possibility of using RPG to access non-DB2 databases, making RPG work with Oracle or MySQL databases, the other is using RPG to interface with browser applications to interface with browser applications, XML or mobile devices.

The team at Profound Logic is interested in getting feedback on what you would like them to cover in future videos. Leave your comments here or contact them directly.

Young i Professionals start Virtual Learning Center

The Young i Professionals group has launched its Virtual Learning Center, a way for IT pros go to get online tutorials on the System i platform.

One of the early goals of the group was educational, and the VLC is a step in that direction. The YiPs, which started a couple years ago and continues to chug along, have a few tutorials already up on the site, mainly on PHP, Rational Developer for System i (RDi) and WebSphere. Other categories not filled yet include others related to programming, such as RPG, Java and C, as well as hardware and operating system categories.

The free tutorials now are just text, but the VLC is able to expand to videos, Q&As and other formats.

What you can do to spur growth in System i

Trevor Perry writes this week about a recent System i conference he went to, and a panel session he moderated. Anyone who knows Perry knows that he complains about the complainers. That is, he criticizes those who bemoan platform name changes, IBM’s marketing of the System i, and so forth.

This time, however, I think he has a solid argument.

Perry recalled how, during the panel session, the discussion arose regarding the shrinking pool of System i developers out there. Some panel members pointed to the IBM Academic Initiative, which has gotten some System i-related courses in universities and community colleges. Attendees supported this kind of educational effort, but as Perry writes, the complaints continued:

And the conversation went around and around. And the complaints continued. While we all love love love the platform, there are not enough people who know about IBM i, not enough new programmers working on IBM i, not enough, not enough, not enough… So, I asked everyone in the room – about 40 or so, some questions I have used with the i community in the past. I had just not paid attention to the answer.

The questions were:

• “How many of you have talked to your local college or school and encouraged them to teach IBM i and RPG?”
• “How many of you have hired interns from local colleges to work with your IT department with IBM i and RPG?”
• “How many of you have told someone outside this community about this amazing platform?”

As Perry recalls, there was a lot of uncomfortable silence following those questions, and Perry knew why. Because they hadn’t actually done any of those things. He thinks that everyone in the System i community — not only IBM, the ISVs, the VARs and the consultants, but the end users too — should be participating and doing things to further the platform. He has a point.

Rochester’s support for the IBM System i

It’s often good to take a look at things a year or so down the road, and that’s what I did with a recent story looking back at the merger of System i and System p into Power Systems. At the time of announcement, emotions can often be raw and reactions of the knee-jerk variety, but as time goes on, those involved in the merger can gain perspective about how it really affected the platform.

For the most part, IT pros told me that the results were mixed — from a technological and cost standpoint it was good for System i, but from a community and support aspect, not so much.

Shortly after the story came out, I got an email from an IBM VAR that basically confirmed the story. It came from Warren Muldrow, a senior programmer and analyst with Springfield, Mo.-based Karmak Inc. Here it is:

We are an IBM i VAR.  Just two brief comments:

1. It is obvious that a large number of the “i” community is no longer at Rochester.  Getting support from someone who can speak “i” is a real challenge.
2. Like many of those who remain in Rochester, we feel like we’ve been “p’ed” on.

In a follow-up email, Muldrow wrote that he couldn’t take credit for the “p’ed on” comment.

“Urban legend says it was first seen on a t-shirt inside the hallowed halls of IBM Rochester,” he wrote.

Top 10, er, 20 reasons to move to IBM i 6.1

Craig Johnson at IBM Systems Magazine has his top 10 list, which morphed into a top 20 list. It starts with a push toward blades and ends with a pitch saying the OS is available on DVD. Here are the top 5. Check out the link for the rest:

1. Enable consolidation of i and x86 servers with an IBM BladeCenter solution. IBM i 6.1 is supported in IBM BladeCenter S and H with BladeCenter JS12, JS22, JS23 and JS43 blades.
2. Reduce impact of planned and unplanned outages with a high-availability solution from IBM. IBM i 6.1 supports the new PowerHA for i disk-clustering solution.
3. Better performance for i and IBM System Storage environments through improved storage-area network (SAN) support. i 6.1 with POWER6 processor based-servers and a new Fibre Channel Adapter can deliver performance with the DS8000 that’s comparable to internal disk.
4. Increased performance for Java and WebSphere applications with IBM i 6.1 enhancements. In Java-application performance tests, IBM i delivered 68-78 percent more transactions per second than i 5.4 running on the same POWER5+ processor-based server.
5. Reduce IT costs with an easy, integrated, Web-based management environment. IBM i 6.1 delivers Systems Director Navigator for i that enables Web-based management. Navigator integrates with IBM Systems Director 6.1 providing a rich management environment for multiple, heterogeneous servers.

IBM Power Systems product list getting shorter

IBM has announced that it will withdraw from marketing a bunch of Power Systems-related products starting on January 4. I counted 91 different feature numbers, so if you have an older Power-based server, it might do you well to take a quick scan and see if you need anything.

IT Jungle listed what it considered to be some of the more important items:

The processor cables that are used to lash multiple Power 570 boxes together into a single SMP server are going, so is the dual-port GX host channel adapters and conversion cables for the original Remote I/O (RIO, a variant of Fibre Channel) to the RIO-2 (a faster Fibre Channel) external drawers. A whole slew of SCSI cables are biting the dust, and as are dual-line power cords used with earlier Power 570 and Power 595 boxes, and so is the twinaxial workstation controller used in the current Power Systems lineup. (That could be a biggie for a lot of i shops.)

The article also lists of bunch of other processor and memory cards, and power supplies.

Lawson Software quarterly results mixed

Lawson Software, a midrange ERP software company and a longtime System i vendor, showed some mixed results when announcing its most recent quarterly results.

Total revenues for the St. Paul, Minn.-based company were down 11% from the same quarter last year, but this is no surprise. Just about every vendor, software and hardware, have been seeing decreased revenue this year.

What is perhaps telling is that revenue from software licensing fees for Lawson is up 23% from last year. The company says in its release that the increase was “driven primarily by increases in healthcare, public sector and equipment service management & rental vertical markets. Contributing to the increase was the recognition of a larger amount of deferred license fees in the first quarter of fiscal 2010 as compared to the similar period last year as well as several significant deals signed and recognized in the current quarter.”

In general, overall software revenues were up 1%, according to the company. What took a hit was consulting revenue, which dropped 29% “driven by fewer billable consultants. The company has reduced the size of its consulting staff as part of a strategy to move more implementation services to its partner channel as well as due to lower bookings for consulting and implementation services.”

“We delivered strong software revenue and excellent earnings growth despite continued weakness in the global economy,” Harry Debes, Lawson president and chief executive officer, said in the statement. “Our vertical strategy is yielding growth in software revenues and our continued focus on internal efficiencies has significantly improved operating margin.”

Zend for System i now only free for the first year?

The IBM i development blog has heard from a user who has been told that Zend Core for System i is only free for the first year. Whether this is true for all customers or not is unclear, but here’s a snippet of what the end user has heard from Zend:

“We can install Zend Core for i5 and all nine developers can use Zend Studio for i5 and we can continue to utilize these products free of charge for one year and one year only. When the first, free year concludes, in order to continue using the Zend products, we will need to purchase…”

The IBM i development blog says that they’ve been using Zend on i for three years now with no demand for payments.

Update: It seems as though support for Zend Core is free only for the first year, but the software itself remains free past one year and beyond.