News Briefs and Product Shorts

Beer Distributor Takes a Liking to Linux for Self-Service Web Apps

What's the next best thing to being able to place your beer orders over the Web? If you are Brewers Distributor Ltd. (BDL) of Calgary, Alberta, it's running your online beer-ordering application in the Linux partition of a new i5 Model 550 server, instead of another Windows server. The privately held distributor of Labatt and Molson brews relies on the iSeries and Windows platforms for most of its IT needs. But a recent iSeries upgrade this winter positioned BDL to partake of the fruits of the open-source operating system as an alternative to Windows for edge services. "We'd been reading about Linux for some time and wanted to get our feet wet," says Andrew Hobbs, BDL's IT manager. The company developed the beer-ordering application using development tools from LANSA, specifically a product called LANSA for the Web Edge Server. The application has become a hit among BDL's customers, and today, about 30 percent of BDL's customers use the Web to check on inventory, order history, order confirmations, and other information--things that normally could only be done over the phone or using a fax machine, and only during business hours. The plan is to have 70 percent or more of BDL customers using the application, Hobbs says. "This has been an educational process for us, and while we still have a lot to learn, Linux is a viable, more cost-effective alternative to Windows for some of our workloads," he says. "We've seen positive results, so we'll continue our exploration down the Linux road."

Free Windows-based Utility for DB2/400 Is Spelled F.R.O.G.

iSeries administrators on the hunt for a free Windows utility for browsing DB2/400 may want to check out Jonas Temple's creation, called F.R.O.G. This piece of freeware lets users browse DB2/400 libraries, files, members, and fields; execute SQL statements against the database; view the properties of the files; save the results of a SQL statement to a PC; and generate the SQL syntax needed to create an object. Temple recently updated his F.R.O.G. software to version 1.4.5, which fixes some errors users experienced with Client Access with OS/400 V5R3. For more information on F.R.O.G. and downloads, go to www.yhti.net/~jktemple/frog.htm.

Crate and Barrel Taps Firstlogic for Data Quality, Customer Analysis Programs

Crate and Barrel will be using the Information Quality Suite from Firstlogic to cleanse and standardize its customer data before loading it into its OS/400-based customer information system. In addition to making sure that things like customer addresses are correct, the Information Quality Suite will help Crate and Barrel create "household" views of its data to better analyze sale patterns, Firstlogic announced last week. "If we don't get an address correct, there are significant charges that are billed back to us for corrections from shipping providers," says Ed Rennemann, Crate and Barrel's CIO. "Even though our percentage of address errors is actually quite low, with our high volumes, the costs become significant. Due to this fact alone, we expect the Firstlogic software to pay for itself very quickly." The software will also help Crate and Barrel to create and maintain a single view of each customer, and to enable the retailer to perform advanced customer behavioral analysis, modeling, geographic analysis, data mining, and campaign management.

Fidelity Launches Corebank J2EE

Fidelity Information Services last week officially launched Corebank, a new banking application written in the J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) programming language. Fidelity says Corebank J2EE offers the same features as the mainframe version of Corebank, and supports the same range of customer, product build, deposit, lending, and payment functionality that retail banks require. Corebank J2EE saw its first implementation late last year at Suruga Bank alongside IBM's recently launched Core Systems Transformation solution (CST) for migrating banks' back-office systems to modern solutions in a phased approach (see "IBM Launches WebSphere-based Banking Solution for eServers"). "Many banks are looking for solutions to replace legacy systems that can be introduced without delay, with significantly decreased implementation risk and that will improve operational efficiency and deliver business value quickly," says Jim Wilson, president of Fidelity Information Services' International Division. "This solution allows financial organizations to select the system configuration most appropriate for their business strategy and system scale."

Pump Manufacturer Finds QSystem Monitor Helps with ISO 9001, SOX

An American-owned manufacturer of storm water pumps has re-certified its ISO 9001 accreditations and met Sarbanes Oxley Act standards, thanks, in part, to help from an OS/400 systems management tool from CCSS. The IS managers at ITT Flygt, a developer of huge submersible pumps that proved invaluable in combating flood waters from last year's hurricanes, finds that CCSS' QSystem Monitor software is instrumental in ensuring the company's iSeries servers are operating according to guidelines. "QSystem Monitor delivers indicators that show that the information systems infrastructure is mastered by the IT department," says Eric Larmier, the France-based director of information systems for ITT Flygt, which is headquartered in Sweden, but owned by the ITT group, a $6.8-billion corporation headquartered in White Plains, New York (such is the way with globalization these days). "The one-screen display dashboard is fully part of managing and controlling our iSeries infrastructure. As such, it is included in all of our ISO procedures and is part of our ongoing quality assurance," Larmier says. ISO 9001 and SOX are alike in some ways, he says. "SOX is similar to ISO 9001 in terms of managing the iSeries physical and logical security, as well as internal control. QSystem Monitor audits and documents activity 24x7 in three key areas: user systems access, system performance, and accounting."

Moeller Marine Streamlines MAPICS Reporting with Compleo

Moeller Marine Products successfully re-tooled its MAPICS reporting with the Compleo utility from Symtrax, the software company recently announced. The Sparta, Texas-based manufacturer of plastic parts for boat builders was having difficulty generating custom reports from its OS/400-based ERP system. "We have a lot of information from MAPICS but extracting the right data and being able to manipulate it is very difficult," says Leona Gabrielli, a systems administrator at Moeller. "We could of course run a query and extract it into Excel, but that is a difficult task and it was too much effort for the end-users." The solution was Compleo, a spool-file management utility from Symtrax that allows Moeller to export its MAPICS reports directly from the iSeries into an Excel spreadsheet. Once the users had the iSeries data in the Excel format, they are good to go. "Compleo is one of the best tools we've put in place, as it gives us flexibility in terms of both analysis and distribution of our MAPICS reports," Gabrielli says. "We've had it for years and we haven't stopped finding a use for it."