ERP Update Streamlines Attendee Access to Wimbledon's Top Courts

More tennis fans will be able to enjoy tart strawberries, heavy cream, and the all-grass play on the top courts of the All England Tennis Club's Wimbledon Championships this year, thanks to a recently upgraded OS/400 ERP system. British IT publisher VNU reports that Wimbledon has upgraded its Geac System21 ERP system to improve the management of debenture certificates and to enable wireless ticket scanning. The wireless ticketing system should allow more attendees to watch tennis matches on the top court. Previously, when people exited the top court area, they deposited their ticket into a red box, which Wimbledon employees would then sort through manually to see how many more people they could let in, according to the report. Now, as attendees leave the area, their tickets are scanned with wireless devices that are connected to an iSeries Model 270, which allows the club to more quickly issue new tickets to the top courts, and maximize capacity and viewership.

PerformanceIT Delivers Mobile Monitoring Capabilities

OS/400 shops can now wirelessly monitor their servers, applications, and networks using PerformanceIT's ProIT Wireless Interface, a component of its ProIT systems management suite. PerformanceIT delivered an "event-threshold-action module" for AS/400 and iSeries servers with ProIT version 2.5, which shipped in February 2003 (see "PerformanceIT Brings Affordability to Network Management"). The new ProIT Wireless Interface announced in March extends ProIT screens to any browser-enabled mobile device, and includes remote control and diagnostic utilities that helps support personnel to acknowledge, escalate, and remotely fix problems. ProIT Wireless Interface works with ProIT 3.0, and requires the Alarm Management Workflow engine.

IBM Attracts Three New iSeries Customers From HP

The promise of savings through server consolidation is helping IBM land new customers for the iSeries. During the Power5 introduction event in New York City a couple weeks ago, IBM announced that three former Hewlett-Packard customers have decided to replace their proprietary HP 3000 servers with iSeries servers. The three customers are: Memory Experts International, a computer memory manufacturer based in Montreal, Canada; liquor distributor Block/Goldring of San Antonio, Texas; and Christie Digital, a video projector manufacturer from Cypress, California. In each case, IBM says the companies bought iSeries servers to simplify their HP-based IT infrastructure and lower costs.

UCCnet Subscriptions Up 375 Percent, with 3,000+ Companies Now Signed Up

American manufacturers and retailers continue to sign up with the UCCnet's GLOBALregistry in droves. Last week the not-for-profit organization announced that 566 companies signed up for UCCnet's item product data synchronization service during the first three months of 2004, trouncing the 119 new companies that signed up during the first three months of 2003, and bringing the total number of subscribers to more than 3,000. The UCCnet's services, which are not free, enable retailers and manufacturers to be on the same page when it comes to their product data standards. Much of the increase so far this year could be attributed to Wal-Mart's January 1, 2004 deadline for UCCnet compliance for some of its suppliers. Other major chains, including "hardline goods" retailers such as Home Depot, Ace, and Lowe's, are also instituting UCCnet requirements for their suppliers. But some retailers are not.

Manufacturer Beats Retailer to the Punch with UCCnet Software from LANSA

LANSA announced last week that its customer, Arrow Group Industries, is hooked up to UCCnet--even if its trading partners necessarily aren't. The Wayne, New Jersey, company, which is the largest manufacturer of storage buildings in the world, sells to retailers who have made UCCnet mandates, including The Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace, and Wal-Mart. The company started its UCCnet research in October, 2003, and had LANSA's Data Sync Direct software installed on its Hewlett-Packard DL380 Windows server by December, allowing it to publish data, via the new global trade identification numbers (GTINs) data standard, to the UCCnet GLOBALregistry. Now that Arrow has built it, it's waiting for its retailer partners to show up. "We're ahead of the game," said Donna Cavallo, Arrow's director of Internet marketing. "Retailers said we needed to be compliant by December 2003, and now we're waiting to the retailers to finish their projects be able to accept our data."