News Briefs and Product Shorts

B&L Offers Business Intelligence Tool for DB2/400, Other Databases

B&L Information Systems, a Michigan company that serves the metal casting and plastics industries with its ERP software, is now shipping Intelligent Views, a browser-based business intelligence program that was designed to make it easy for end-users to access, run formulas, and summarize any data contained in a standard database. Intelligent View, which runs from a centralized Windows server and utilizes a step-by-step "wizard" for development, enables authenticated users to access pre-defined screens, or "views," from any device that supports a Web browser. Potential uses of this product include providing customers, suppliers, and employees with order status, product pricing, or material requirements pages. Intelligent Views was officially released last October, and there are now about a dozen B&L Information Systems customers running it against both of the company's ERP systems, including the RPG-based BLIS-400 and the Windows-based Odyssey, according to staffers at the company's booth at the COMMON conference in Chicago last month. Pricing is about $20,000.

PUMA North America Fine Tunes Retail Decision Making with ShowCase

PUMA North America has found a business intelligence tool that helps it make good decisions about its athletic shoe distribution business. Last week, SPSS announced that the North American subsidiary of the German footwear and apparel company is using the ShowCase Suite of business intelligence software in place of its OS/400-based ERP suite's existing reporting systems. PUMA has provided about 70 independent sales consultants, who are responsible for making important business decisions every day, with access to data cubes generated by the ShowCase toolset, which the consultants use to create real-time inventory reports that track retail sales and identify products and sizes that are selling. The ShowCase reports also track individual store performance on an hourly, monthly, or yearly basis and provide store-to-store comparisons, SPSS says. If sales of a particular shoe model increase, PUMA can ramp up production of that shoe. "With SPSS, PUMA has completely replaced 80 percent of our ERP system reports, which were highly inflexible and required us to contact the vendor for simple template changes," said Karen King, a database analyst for PUMA North America. "Previously, it would take a day or more to create a report. Now, PUMA can obtain reports in less than an hour, and sometimes in as little as 10 to 20 minutes." Chicago-based SPSS is shipping a new release of the ShowCase Suite this month; see "SPSS Boosts OLAP Performance with ShowCase Suite 7.0".

TECSYS Completes Acquisition of OS/400 WMS Provider ASI

TECSYS has completed its acquisition of Application Solutions Inc. (ASI), a Markham, Ontario, developer of OS/400-based warehouse management systems. TECSYS, which is based in Montreal, Quebec, provides an array of supply chain management (SCM) and healthcare applications through various subsidiaries, and has renamed the ASI business the TECSYS Logistics Management Group. ASI had approximately 300 customers, including adidas-Solomon of Canada, which won a Canadian Information Productivity Awards (CIPA) honor for its IT management practices, and was featured by IBM as a good example of how to do server consolidations (see "iSeries Is Center of Lean IT Operation At adidas-Salomon Canada" for the IT Jungle case study). TECSYS, which is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange and had $5.3 million in revenues in its last reported quarter, acquired ASI for $1.64 per share, but did not disclose the number of shares it acquired.

DataMirror Joins Eclipse While Revealing Eclipse Plug-In for Java Database

DataMirror announced last week that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and is including an Eclipse plug-in in the next release of its embeddable Java database. The plug-in that will ship with PointBase version 5.2 will enable PointBase developers to write and test JDBC and SQL code within the Eclipse development environment, the company says. Nigel Stokes, CEO of DataMirror, says joining Eclipse and delivering the PointBase plug-in demonstrates DataMirror's support for all of the major Java development environments. "DataMirror is encouraging the trend towards giving organizations the freedom to choose the platform and development environment in which they want to work," Stokes says.

Popular Network and UPS Hardware Can Now Be Monitored by PerformanceIT

PerformanceIT, an Atlanta provider of network performance monitoring solutions, last week unveiled a new collection of 10 management packs that allow users to monitor the performance of network hardware and uninterruptible power systems (UPS) from major vendors. The new management packs brings users the capability to monitor routers and switches from Foundry Networks, Brocade Communications Systems' Fibre Channel SAN switches, Nortel Networks layer 4-7 switches, and UPS systems from Liebert and American Power Conversion (APC). The new management packs deliver auto-configured monitoring of interface statistics, CPU, memory, and key performance and health indicators for hardware. PerformanceIT unveiled iSeries support with the version 2.5 release of its ProIT management console (see "PerformanceIT Brings Affordability to Network Management"). The company is currently on version 3.

Ericom Expands PowerTerm Distribution with UCSI Partnership

Emulation software provider Ericom Software has partnered with Unique Co-operative Solutions Inc. (UCSI), a Kansas City, Missouri, provider of thin clients, the companies announced last week. The partnership with UCSI will open a new channel for Ericom's emulation offerings, which offer a wide range of connectivity options for iSeries, mainframe, Unix, Windows, and various other legacy hosts. Ericom recently brought Windows Server connectivity to its emulation suite, called PowerTerm WebConnect (see "Ericom Adds Windows Terminal Server to Host Emulation Suite"). UCSI builds thin client products for OEMs.