June, 2009

Top concerns of System i users in Europe

Here are the top concerns of European System i users, according to a survey taken by COMMON Europe:

1. Satisfy internal customers
2. Treat data security and confidentiality as a business risk
3. Improve IT security and continuity
4. Receive consistent high quality service and support from vendors
5. Keep the skills current for the existing staff
6. Make me grow as a more competent individual
7. Do fast application development to fulfill business needs
8. Build business skills in the information technology shop
9. Standardize and consolidate IT infrastructure
10. Attract the younger generation to centralized systems
11. Easily exchange information with other companies/institutions
12. Find applications that fulfill business needs
13. Acquire and retain IT personnel
14. Correctly measure the value of IT to business
15. Integrate document management and unstructured data with core applications
16. Assure better data warehousing with real answers to business questions

Western Power Sports boosts online sales with the System i

Western Power Sports reworked its online presence using Web development tools on the System i, a move that has increased online sales of its power sports equipment fivefold.

Prior to the project, the Boise, Idaho-based company was only generating about 10% of its sales online. Now about half of its sales comes over the Internet, garnering more than 1 million page views, 17,000 orders and about $7.5 million in sales every month.

How did it happen? Well, it almost didn’t. The fast-growing company was outgrowing its outdated Web presence, and needed something that would better integrate with its existing System i platform.

“We didn’t have the time or the ability at that point to develop our own solution,” said Rody Cummings, the company’s IT director. “What we were looking for was a company to sell us a product and also provide a solution they could support.”

What Cummings found was that most products had steep, lengthy learning curves that Western Power Sports didn’t have the time to endure. So the company was leaning toward outsourcing its Web development entirely.

It decided to listen to one more pitch, from a company called Profound Logic. The software vendor sells RPGsp, an RPG-based Web development platform on the System i. Cummings said that halfway through the demonstration, he knew it was something that Western Power Sports could use.

A few weeks later, Western Power Sports had developed a new online platform that was implemented soon after.

“With our previous solution it would have taken a full week of me working with the product along with their team just to get a website online that still had no functionality,” he said.

A bunch of System i videos on YouTube

nbsp;Midrange.com has four YouTube videos embedded in a post on the benefits of IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure. The videos are of various System i personalities riffing on how cool the platform is. The videos were reportedly taken at the COMMON show in Reno. They star Trevor Perry, Pete Massiello, Justin Porter and Jim Oberholtzer, and there are a couple more (Wayne Madden and Lew Satur) at an IBM YouTube channel.

Does this mean all System i users are headcases?

I just saw this job posting on midrange.com: Psychiatrist, American Hospital Service Group.

The description: “Great opportunity to work for your country as a psychiatrist. Candidate must have 2yrs experience and will evaluate,diagnoses & treat psychiatric disorders.”

Twittering off the System i

Usually when I think of the IBM System i, Twitter doesn’t pop into my head. Kisco Information Systems, a longtime IBM System i software vendor, is looking to change that.

Last week the Saranac Lake, N.Y.-based company announced a new release of SNDTWEET, an application that allows users to post, receive and reply to Twitter messages from a System i server. The company pitches the application as a way to turn Twitter into a modern-day SMS system for your shop.

For example, a system running some regular overnight processing could automatically send out a tweet to its followers (ie. the System i administrator and programmers) when it completes. If the tweet doesn’t go out, it’s likely there was a problem. System i Twitter users can send each other messages, or the company’s marketing department could set up a list of tweets to promote company announcements on certain days. Though a Twitter account’s default is to have all its tweets be public to the whole world, you can change that setting to private when you set up an account.

Is relying on Twitter as an SMS service good business practice? That is something you would have to figure out if you’re considering using this product. There are occasional outages on Twitter, and relying on an application to contact a third-party service might not be the best way to do system monitoring. Kisco is offering a 30-day free trial of the product if you want to check it out.

RPG as a service

Beyond the world of IBM i, the hottest topic in IT right now is “Cloud Computing,” which is essentially a mix of platform and software-as-a-service (PaaS and SaaS) offerings that are available on-demand. So it was with a little amusement and some interest that I read the press release from vLegaci offering RPGAAS. That’s right, RPG as a service.

“… designed for companies who don’t always have an RPG programmer available, or need quick, cost-effective programming results…”

After a year of reading emails from readers inquiring about a variety of topics, I have to think that there is a market for such a product, and vLegaci’s President, Steve Kilner, says that Gartner’s findings support this supposition.

“Consensus is emerging from IT thought leaders such as Gartner Group and Capers Jones that maintaining and modernizing legacy systems gives the best possible return on IT dollars,” said Kilner. “For businesses with legacy RPG systems, the dwindling pool of RPG programmers poses the challenge of how to get unfamiliar programmers up to speed rapidly on complicated legacy code. vLegaci addresses this through the use of its innovative program comprehension tool, Codelyzer. This static and dynamic analysis tool enables new programmers to quickly assess unfamiliar RPG programs, thereby enabling the concept of a service such as RPGAAS.”

What do you think? Is this a service your company could use?

IBM cuts prices to a bunch of Power Systems upgrades

Big Blue has slashed prices for most of 20 different upgrades on Power Systems, some by as much as 54%. Some of the upgrades include moving from a Power 5+ processor to a Power 6, and adding memory. There are two upgrade changes that are price increases.

The announcement letter has a list of all the price changes, but there is also a more detailed look at what the feature upgrades are.

Take System i classes over the Web

IBM System i high availability software vendor Vision Solutions is now offering a host of courses on the System i platform and high availability. The great majority of them are related to Vision products like iTera, Mimix and Orion, but there is one introductory course on the i5 operating system.

The press release describes the new online program, and you can start checking them out at Vision’s education page.

Rich Internet applications on IBM i

At COMMON in April, I met with Alex Roytman of ProfoundLogic Software, who shared the company’s Profound Logic TV initiative to share educational videos with IBM i professionals.

Last week the company released their newest video on Rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the IBM i. Roytman provides some background information on the technology and compares RIAs with traditional Web applications, and shows how RIA Libraries and Frameworks can help create powerful user interfaces with little to no coding.

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.