News Briefs and Product Shorts

IBM Showcases Hurricane-Resistant Server Technology

It sounds a bit like a "Legends of iSeries" tale, but we're told by IBM that the story is 100 percent true. The story has to do with British Caymanian Insurance, one of a number of iSeries shops in the Caribbean, and it features bits of scrap timber, an air mattress, and Hurricane Ivan. According to the IBM press release issued last week, the situation went something like this: "On Sept. 12, 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed into the Cayman Islands with 200-mile-an-hour winds. Torrential rain filled the data center on the top floor of the four-story office with five inches of water. Faced with power failure and structural damage, the Colonial Group International IT team [British Caymanian's IT provider] was forced to maneuver the iSeries system out of the damaged building by using scraps of wood and an air mattress to navigate the machine down 80 stairs. Once in a temporary workspace, CGI personnel plugged the server into their network infrastructure where the iSeries responded immediately."

The IT Jungle is not at all surprised the iSeries fired right back up, considering the AS/400's reputation for surviving much worse. What is a little shocking is that Armonk--led by new iSeries GM Mark Shearer and his VP of marketing, Peter Bingaman--is now working to resurrect this amazing, but almost abandoned, machine and help it to regain its appropriate server market share, which IBMers say is 100 percent. Apparently miracles do happen.

ASC Delivers New IFS Cross-Referencing Capability in ABSTRACT

Advanced Systems Concepts (ASC) recently updated its ABSTRACT cross-reference analysis and programming tool with new IFS tracking capabilities. ASC says it has added a new API to ABSTRACT that allows users to track IFS objects and directories back to iSeries host objects. By cross referencing IFS and native files and objects, iSeries programmers can build a better "where used" repository of their OS/400 applications, and thereby get a leg up on building efficient new applications from scratch, or troubleshooting existing applications that are misbehaving. In addition to the where used cross-reference repository, ABSTRACT supports the generation of application flowcharts, either through Microsoft Visio, or using the ABSTRACT plug-ins for iSeries Navigator or WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc). Programmers can use ABSTRACT through either WDSc, iSeries Navigator, or greenscreen interfaces. License fees range from $4,500 to $7,000.

IBM Announces New Identity-based Spam Filter, While Spam Counts Drop

IBM last week took the curious steps of introducing new weapons to fight the ongoing war against spam, while simultaneously announcing that it is seeing the volume of spam drop off. The new anti-spam weapon, called FairUCE (or Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email), takes a different approach to fighting spam than most tools on the market. Instead of filtering content, FairUCE looks at the identity of the e-mail sender to determine if the e-mail is spam or not. If the e-mail domain, e-mail address, and the IP address of the computer from which it was sent don't match up, then FairUCE assumes it was sent by a spammer trying to hide their identity using a zombie computer or bot device, and blocks the spam from going through. The software runs only on Linux, and is currently available worldwide (except for Germany) at www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/fairuce.

IBM also announced it saw a 7 percent reduction in the amount of spam from January to February. According to IBM's February Global Business Security Index, spam decreased from 83.11 percent in January to 76.3 percent in February, which mirrors similar declines other organizations have witnessed recently. Lest it rationalize its way out of a potential market for spam-fighting tools, IBM said, "Despite the decrease, spam continues to be a major headache and tax on IT staffs worldwide." And we all know that to be true.

Skyway Software to Help OS/400 Shop with SOA Development

Onyx Environmental Services, a Lombard, Illinois, provider of hazardous waste treatment and disposal services, has chosen Skyway Software to extend its iSeries applications with Java and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, Skyway announced last week. Onyx will use Skyway Builder, a rapid development environment that generates Enterprise Java, Second Edition (J2EE) code, to build and roll-out composite applications under an SOA. "Onyx has been challenged with providing higher levels of customer information services with a limited amount of technical resources," says Robert Lowe, Onyx's CIO. "Using Skyway Software to write composite business services and applications, we will now be able to more quickly respond to user and customer requests while effectively managing Onyx business functions and Web services throughout the enterprise." Skyway Software is based in Tampa, Florida, and was founded in the fall of 2001 by two former executives of TRADEX, which was bought by Ariba for $5.4 billion in 2000.

Address Correction Technology from Group 1 and Pitney Bowes Now United

Group 1 Software last week unveiled new address correction software that unites its own CODE-1 Plus address correction engine with Finalist, the address correction engine developed by its parent company, Pitney Bowes. The new product, called DualCoder, enables companies with high mailing volume to utilize both products to get the highest possible address quality, and therefore the lowest mailing rates from the U.S. Postal Service, says Kurt Konow, vice president of product management at Group 1. Companies can either use CODE-1 Plus, which runs on OS/400 in addition to other major platforms, or Finalist, which runs on mainframe, Unix, and Windows (but not OS/400), as their primary address-correction engine. If the primary product fails to accurately code an address, the secondary address-correction engine kicks in, providing the maximum amount of coverage. For Group 1's iSeries customers, which account for just a fraction of the 3,000 installations between the two organizations, the only caveat is that, in order for DualCoder to work, all three products--including CODE-1 Plus, Finalist, and the integration code--must run on the same platform, which likely eliminates the iSeries as a candidate. However, this may change, as Group 1 and Pitney Bowes are considering opening up Finalist to other platforms, including OS/400, depending on the feedback it receives at the companies' respective user conferences coming up, Konow says. Pitney Bowes acquired Group 1 Software last summer for $321 million.

Two J.D. Edwards Shops License Global's Spreadsheet Server

Global Software keeps racking up the customer wins, and isn't afraid to talk about them. The latest organizations to sign up with the Raleigh, North Carolina, software developer are Canson, a New England paper manufacturer, and Glenoit, a provider of decorative home fashions from the Tar Heel State. Both companies have licensed Global's Spreadsheet Server for J.D. Edwards application, which provides a real-time link between Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software and financial data in World and EnterpriseOne ERP systems, thereby opening up a new world of reports and eliminating the re-keying of data into reporting systems. Canson is using Spreadsheet Server to streamline financial reporting. "The time that it has saved our financial department each month is insurmountable. It's allowed us to make strides in other areas that had been put aside because of time constraints," says Sonja Pella, Canson's controller. Cynthia Powell, a division controller for Glenoit, says the Spreadsheet Server software "is everything it's sold as, and then some. We are saving significant amounts of time at our month end closes, generating reports with ease and have put the power of financial reporting in the hands of the financial user who knows and understands our critical business data."