LBM Systems Adds iSeries Support to Print Server

Published: April 25, 2006

by Alex Woodie

OS/400 and i5/OS shops on the hunt for an output management product for their AS/400, iSeries, and System/5 servers may want to check out LBM Systems. Earlier this month the Connecticut company that hails from the Hewlett-Packard printing world unveiled AXIAR 6.0, a new release of its multi-platform print server and document management product that now supports iSeries servers, via PASE. The company says it added iSeries support to quell its customers' resistance to implementing "foreign operating systems."

LBM Systems' AXIAR product provides users with several benefits, including reducing reliance on pre-printed forms and expanding document distribution options, both of which can end up saving users money. While it does offer some document management capabilities and can deliver documents to external e-mail gateways, Web sites, and fax servers, AXIAR's greatest strength is performing as a print server.

The AXIAR suite is composed of several components, including AXIAR Format, a reformatting engine that captures plain text print output, merges it with electronic form overlays, and delivers it in PCL, Postscript, PDF, or TIF formats; AXIAR Deliver, which directs documents to printers and other destinations, including e-mail addresses, fax machines, Web sites, and archives; and AXIAR Retrieve, a Windows program that captures and indexes scanned input, and which performs search and retrieval functions within document archives. A forms design tool is also included in the suite.

Up to this point, the AXIAR product suite has been relegated to working with Windows, Unix, and Linux systems, which represent a good chunk of the enterprise IT market, but which doesn't do much for thousands of organizations running enterprise applications on IBM OS/400 servers. With AXIAR 6.0, the company has corrected this shortcoming, and it now can capture and work with OS/400 spool files in the same way it supports print output from other systems. iSeries support in AXIAR 6.0 is delivered via PASE (Portable Application Solutions Environment), the AIX runtime environment in OS/400 servers that allows the boxes to run UNIX applications.

Support for iSeries servers is an important milestone for LBM Systems and AXIAR, says Steven Bardwell, CTO of the New Canaan, Connecticut, company. "The market we serve demands cross-platform solutions that give IT personnel the flexibility to deploy in the operating system of their choice," he says. "Our role is to seamlessly deliver output from a source, regardless of its operating system, to a destination--print, Web, e-mail, fax, and so forth--in a non-intrusive manner. By offering the same output management capabilities on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AS/400 servers, we have eliminated customer resistance to implementing 'foreign' operating systems in their environments."

AXIAR excels in managing printers. As a cross-platform print server, the software can connect dozens of servers, desktops, and printers under a "global view," says Andy Wellman, director of marketing for LBM Systems. Some of the more sophisticated functions include intelligent job routing, in which the software picks the printer best suited for a particular job and re-routes important jobs in the event of a printer failure. Print jobs can also be scheduled by priority, load, and class of printer, and at any time, users can stop, restart, or save print jobs for later execution.

AXIAR also provides a Web interface for reconfiguring printers or accessing other administrative functions, and offers direct links to diagnostic programs embedded into printers, including Web Jetadmin and Markvision, the company says. The software offers delivery notification via e-mail and Windows Messaging, and collects metrics for analyzing print job distribution and cost tracking purposes.

Pricing for AXIAR begins at $5,000 per server, which supports five printers. Additional capabilities, such as routing to non-printer output objects (such as e-mail and fax) and automatic PDF creation and output delivery, cost extra. For more information, see www.lbmsys.com.