News Briefs and Product Shorts

Vision Solutions To Purchase OS Solutions

High availability software vendor Vision Solutions yesterday announced its intention to acquire OS Solutions, a UK-based provider of systems management, disk and data optimization, and high availability software for the iSeries. The two firms are in agreement over the terms of the purchase and the deal is expected to be finalized quickly.

The acquisition will bring new high availability technology to Vision, which should help it gain ground in the small to medium sized business market, where products that are simple and easy to use are in greater demand than those that are more complex. OS Solutions quietly rolled out high availability capabilities in its flagship performance management product, OS Director, in early 2004 before announcing its intentions to enter the high availability software market late last year (see "OS Solutions Relies on Remote Journaling for New HA Offering"). Vision plans to integrate all of OS Director's capabilities into its multi-platform Orion high availability software. This addition, says Vision Solutions vice president of marketing David Wegman, will provide added value to Orion customers. Vision is planning a program that Wegman refers to as "highly optimized HA," the goal of which is creating a cleaner production system, so the replication process becomes more efficient with fewer errors and much quicker role swaps and switchovers.

OS Solutions has the bulk of its business in the European market, and has gained a presence in the American market over the past several years from its U.S. headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut. In addition to its technology assets, OS Solutions' European presence provided a lure for Vision. Its worldwide customer base, which reportedly totals more than 370 businesses, increases Vision's overall customer base to a reported 2,200 customers.

GST Unveils Line of 1 Gigabit Adapters for AIX Servers, Partitions

Things are busy at GST these days. Last week, the company launched its new line of memory for iSeries and pSeries servers (see "GST Unveils Line of Affordable Memory for i5 Servers" in this newsletter). Just yesterday, GST announced its new NetDR family of Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapters for pSeries servers and other eServer systems, such as the i5, that can run AIX partitions. GST says it decided to offer Ethernet adapters when IBM discontinued its FC2975 feature card providing 1 Gigabit network access. "We encountered this need in the market when clients bought our high-performance tape backup solutions and discovered their network could not keep up with today's super-drives," says David Breisacher, GST's CEO and chairman. "The solution was to add an IBM FC2975 feature card, but they were hard to find, used, and not cheap. We turned some of our engineering resources loose on the problem and within six months we had a better card than the original." GST says its 1 Gigabit adapters, which range in price from $575 for a single-port model to $1,100 for a dual-port model, can move data at speeds up to 324.3GB per hour.

Packeteer Bolsters Management of Web Service Traffic with Network Appliances

Companies implementing Web services can now use Packeteer's network appliances to ensure their Web applications don't get drowned out by other traffic on busy networks and WANs. Last week the Cupertino, California, company announced the launch of its new Web Services Workbench, which can be used to identify and classify any number of custom Web service applications a company might be using across its WAN, and has built-in support for more than 450 network applications at Layer 7. Simply identifying Web traffic by the HTTP protocol or port number is not sufficient, as Web services used by ERP applications often share the same protocol and port number as casual Web browsing traffic, Packeteer says. "To make networks run efficiently, enterprises need to effectively address Web-enabled applications," says David Puglia, vice president of marketing at Packeteer. "The Web Services Workbench allows them to do this by enabling enterprises to customize and create priorities for their unique blend of SOAP and HTTP traffic, ensuring their business applications receive the highest priority."

Extol's EDI Integrator Gains IBM ServerProven Certification

Extol's EDI Integrator software received the ServerProven certification from IBM, the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, company announced last week. EDI Integrator, which helps companies integrate EDI transactions into their OS/400 applications, is one of the most popular OS/400-based EDI translators on the market, with more than 750 users, including TJMaxx, Merck & Co., Enterprise Rent-A-Car, CR England, Donna Karan NY, Borg Warner, and DSC Logistics, according to Steve Rosen, the company's vice president of marketing. EDI Integrator is the first Extol product to gain the IBM ServerProven certification, which is designed to help prospective buyers evaluate applications. As part of the ServerProven program, customers can get up to $5,000 back on the purchase of a new OS/400 server if they load EDI Integrator onto it. For more information on the ServerProven program, visit www.ibm.com/servers/solutions/finder.

Looksoftware Offers 25 Percent Discount to JDE World Shops

Looksoftware is the latest vendor to lay out the bait for former J.D. Edwards customers in the wake of PeopleSoft's acquisition by Oracle. Last week, look announced that World shops can get up to 25 percent knocked off their newlook and centric license fees if they purchase before June 30. The Melbourne, Australia, software company says World shops can do much to improve the look and functionality of their ERP programs using its non-invasive modernization (newlook) and integration (centric) tools. Examples include pharmaceutical giant Wyeth, which recently implemented newlook at its UK, Ireland, and Sweden facilities to provide role-based user interfaces for a certain World application. Another newlook user is PriceSmart, which has been able to reduce data entry errors by using newlook's Web services capabilities to extend data from World to a SQL Server database.

RJS Software Renames Software Suite, Gains 'OnDemand' Accreditation from IBM

RJS Software Systems announced the re-naming of its OS/400 document management product last week. Image Server/400 is now called WebDocs--iSeries Edition. The Burnsville, Minnesota, company says the name change was made to simplify and unify the branding and marketing of its WebDocs family of products. "We've changed the product name to better reflect the fact that our document management software is Web based and can store and manage any electronic document type including images, Word documents, Excel files, reports, or any PC-generated file," said Richard Schoen, president of RJS Software. In addition to the iSeries edition, RJS also sells a Web Docs--Windows Edition.

In other news, RJS Software also announced it is among the first of IBM's ISV business partners to gain "On Demand" accreditation. Schoen says this means IBM has recognized RJS as a client-focused company that's dedicated to helping its clients increase productivity through the software that it develops. "This validates our company's mission to provide the right solutions for our customers ever-changing, on demand needs," Schoen says.