News Briefs and Product Shorts

Connectria Lands Two Contracts for Remote iSeries Management, Server Outsourcing

Two iSeries shops recently entered deals to move iSeries administration to Connectria, a provider of managed hosting services for iSeries and other platforms. Louis Vuitton, a French manufacturer of luxury consumer goods, will be utilizing Connectria's remote monitoring and management service for batch job processing, alerting of job suspensions or interruptions, PTF and upgrade management, maintenance scheduling, and back ups. Meanwhile, a consumer goods company of another sort, Ecko Unlimited, has also enlisted Connectria for some iSeries assistance. The New York City-based designer of "lifestyle brands" targeted at the hip-hop scene previously relied upon Connectria for basic iSeries administration functions, such as job scheduling, PTF applies, and back-ups, which were performed remotely. Now, Ecko has elected to put its iSeries equipment in Connectria's hands. In addition, Connectria will be hosting Ecko's Lotus Notes and Domino applications in its data centers. Connectria is an IBM business partner based in St. Louis. It charges customers about $2,000 to $3,000 per month for iSeries remote monitoring and administration, following one-time setup charges ranging from $3,500 to $8,500.

Stonesoft Unveils Security Appliance for 'ROBO' Environments

Remote offices often suffer from less comprehensive network security than main offices, which increases the risk of a security breach. So says Finnish iSeries firewall developer Stonesoft, which recently introduced a scaled down intrusion prevention system (IPS), the SGI-20A, designed for use in remote office and branch office, or ROBO, environments with constricted bandwidth. The SGI-20A, like it full-size brethren, the SGI-100A, provides both "sensor" and "analyzer" functionality, and protects users by monitoring network traffic against known attack vectors, validating protocols, detecting port scanning, and providing network event correlation and alert handling. The device is intended to be managed using Stonesoft's StoneGate Management Center for centralized logging (only relevant data is sent, thereby conserving bandwidth), and it also can be hooked up to Stonesoft's Firewall/VPN for blacklisting. (Stonesoft recently issued new releases of these products--see "Stonesoft Clamps Down on Evolving Security Threats with Firewall".) The SGI-20A appliance is rack mountable and includes five "interfaces," one which is used for managing the product, and four for monitoring network traffic. Each interface supports up to 20 Mbit of bandwidth.

Tideway Updates Configuration Management Appliance

OS/400 shops needing assistance managing their disparate (read: Windows) IT equipment may want to check out the latest release of Tideway Systems' Foundation, an IT service configuration management solution that the London company sells as a pre-configured appliance. The role of Foundation is to discover and catalog an organization's computers, operating systems, and common applications, map their dependencies, analyze where the greatest degree of risk exists in the organization's IT infrastructure--such as areas covered by government mandates--and how changes in specific areas are likely to affect the whole. With Foundation 5.3, the company has bolstered its support for Microsoft Windows and Sun Microsystems Solaris operating systems, and exposed new APIs for integrating Foundation with existing business service management (BSM) applications. Foundation supports major server types--including those running OS/400, OS/390, HP-UX, AIX, OpenVMS, Tru64, 2/05, 2/05.e, Windows, and most commercial Linux distributions--through its agent-less "fingerprinting" technology.

Greeting Card Company Taps JDA for Planning Apps

If things go according to plan, Richard Oppenheimer, the vice president of inventory management at Factory Card & Party Outlet, should receive his own greeting card from the board congratulating him for improving the profitability and efficiency of the company. The Naperville, Illinois, chain of 185 stores across 20 states is augmenting its core OS/400-based MMS application with several other products from JDA Software Group, including Portfolio Advanced Replenishment by E3, Seasonal Profiling by Intellect, and Marketplace Replenish, with the goal of improving the way it handles inventory. Among the areas Oppenheimer is looking to JDA for expertise are seasonal profiling, exception management, and promotion management. "We expect seasonal profiling to provide some tremendous benefits to our organization," Oppenheimer says. "We support about 40 seasons that run anywhere from a couple of weeks to nine months, so for us, having more precise seasonality index profiling is crucial to getting the right inventory to the right place at the right time." Marketplace Replenish should give FC&PO the capability to identify fast-occurring trends, right down to the store and product level, Oppenheimer says. "We currently carry 30,000 items and of these, we replenish approximately 16,000. When you multiply this by 185 stores, we basically replenish almost two million store/SKU locations. If we need to zero in on an inventory problem anywhere within the organization, we basically would have to check two million data points and currently, we just don't have the resources to do this." Finally, the E3 promotional sales planning software, which runs on iSeries servers, should help FC&PO build the appropriate inventory levels prior to a promotional event, he says.

Ingenica Unveils Host Printing Utility

Bell Canada subsidiary Ingenica recently launched new software to make printing easier for OS/400, mainframe, and Unix users. The product, called UniPrint Host Module, enables users of these servers to submit PCL5 print jobs to any network-attached printers over Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP sessions. Along the way, the UniPrint Host Module also converts the PCL5 print job to the PDF format, which the Toronto company mistakenly called Printable Document Format. (The last time we checked, PDF still stood for Portable Document Format, but perhaps it is time for a change, Adobe.) Connecting OS/400, mainframe, and Unix servers with network-attached printers increases the potential pool of printers that work with these servers and eliminates the requirement to use specialized servers. "Host Module addresses the needs of mainframe users by making it simple to print from a mainframe application to any desktop or network printer," says Polly Galita, Ingenica's director of sales and marketing. Host Module works with the version 5 releases of the UniPrint Server and Gateway Module products that Ingenica launched in December.

Arrow's Support Net Division Updates OS/400 App

You might be surprised to learn that the Support Net division of iSeries distributor Arrow Electronics not only pushes IBM hardware, but maintains its own line of OS/400 software products as well. Then again, you may not. In any event, the Englewood, Colorado, company recently launched a new release of N/Compass, an OS/400-based supply chain, accounting, and HR package that was first brought to market way back in 1983, and which Arrow obtained with its acquisition of Support Net in 1997. The company has introduced more than 40 new features with N/Compass version 10.3, including a new menu design the company says allows for greater customization, more flexible and professional report presentations, and standards compliance functionality as required by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Sarbanes Oxley Act, the vendor says. One N/Compass user, Bill Smith, a chain of eight appliance and electronics retail stores in Florida, is finding the new time clock interface in version 10.3 a boon to productivity. The time clock interface "has dramatically reduced the potential for data entry errors and has lowered our data input time by more than 80 percent," says Steve Cox, Bill Smith's IT director. "This data management enhancement translates into significant time and cost savings for our businesses." For a full list of new features in N/Compass 10.3 features, see ncompass.supnet.com/new_ie.html.

i5/OS Crash Seen on TV

If you think i5/OS never crashes, watch this. ProData Computer Services has a link on its Web site that will undoubtedly reinforce your belief there is nothing good about crashes. ProData owner, Allen Hartley (and his son, Joe), race a top fuel dragster, which is one of the fastest modes of terrestrial transportation anyone can experience. Compared to the average car on the street that has about 200 horsepower, Hartley's beast tops 6,000 horsepower, which propels it down a quarter-mile of asphalt in 4.5 seconds at a top speed of 335 miles per hour. What has this to do with anything? Well, prominently displayed on the dragster is the i5/OS logo. Now it might be getting a little bit clearer as to where we are going with this i5/OS crash talk. Obviously it is easier to manage i5/OS than it is to manage a 335-mph racecar. Fortunately Joe Hartley walked away from this crash, but the entire episode was captured on video.