News Briefs and Product Shorts

Sonic Enables Military Families to Access OS/400 Account Information Online

Accessing banking and investment accounts just got easier for clients of First Command Financial Planning, a Fort Worth, Texas, company that provides financial services to 300,000 active and retired members of the U.S. military and their families. Sonic Software has announced that First Command successfully used Sonic's enterprise service bus technology to link its OS/400 applications to a front-end Web portal hosted on the BEA Systems WebLogic platform. "We needed an open-standards architecture that would allow us to develop applications that could be plug-and-play and could talk to each other in the same language," says John Quinones, First Command's chief information officer. "With Sonic ESB, we have an enterprise-service-oriented architecture that integrates all of our applications across the architecture." As a result of the integration, First Command's 300,000 clients can now access their financial portfolios, online bank accounts, and investments accounts, including accounts held with other financial services companies, anytime of day from over the Internet. Sonic Software, an English division of Progress Software, runs its Sonic enterprise service bus on Wintel servers.

SoftLanding Joins Eclipse Foundation

SoftLanding Systems is now part of the Eclipse organization. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, provider of change management software for OS/400 and other platforms has been a vocal supporter of IBM's Eclipse-backed WebSphere developer tools for some time, so it's not surprising to see the company officially join the backer of open-source development tools. "Joining the Eclipse community is a natural extension of our commitment to realizing the potential of WebSphere Development Studio for iSeries," says Steve Gapp, president of SoftLanding. The company's TurnOver change management software can help iSeries shops keep a handle on their development projects across OS/400, Windows, Unix, and Linux servers. With a plug-in for WebSphere Development Studio client, SoftLanding customers can access TurnOver without leaving the WDSc IDE. SoftLanding says it was the first vendor to earn IBM's "Ready for WebSphere Studio" validation for native iSeries development support in early 2003.

CentricStor Virtual Tape Library Gains Support for Cheaper ATA Disk

Fujitsu Siemens has announced a new release of CentricStor, a virtual tape library system that got OS/400 support in July. CentricStor speeds backups by first writing data to disk instead of tape. Users then can plug their tape libraries into the back end of the CentricStor devices (it emulates IBM 3590 Magstar drives for OS/400 connectivity) for long-term storage or archiving. With the new CentricStor 3.0, the devices gain support for ATA disks, which are considerably less expensive than the Fibre Channel disks that CentricStor previously required. The new release also offers double the throughput of previous versions, the company says, and also offers support for the mainframe FICON storage protocol and the backup and recovery software from Computer Associates and EMC's Legato division. CentricStor is distributed in the United States by Colorado-based PeakData.

EMC's Legato EmailXtender Gains OS/400 V5R3 Support

EMC has announced OS/400 V5R3 support for its Legato EmailXtender software for storing and retrieving e-mail and instant messages on Microsoft Exchange and IBM Domino messaging servers, among other enhancements. The new release of the EmailXtender software, expected to ship in December, supports up to Notes/Domino 6.5.3 on OS/400 V5R3, AIX 5.2, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0. On the Windows/Exchange platform, Legato EmailExtender now offers users the capability to access archived e-mail via Outlook Web Access for Microsoft Exchange 2003. This release also has a simplified installation and upgrade process, as well as new system health monitoring capabilities.

DataMirror Boosts Performance of PointBase Database

DataMirror has announced a new release of PointBase, its embeddable Java relational database. With PointBase 5.1, the software developer is offering many new features for both the PointBase Embedded database, as well as the PointBase UniSync data synchronization product. PointBase 5.1 introduces new memory-based hash join algorithms, which improves the performance of large, multi-table joins and reporting applications, as well as truncated tables, new security logs that can be encrypted, and other enhancements that can improve overall performance by 15 to 30 percent. Enhancements to the UniSync component with Version 5.1 include support for many-to-many join filters and data compression for improved network use. PointBase is one of the components in DataMirror's new Integration Suite 2005, a collection of data synchronization and auditing software and services designed to help customers with data integration and compliance projects (see "DataMirror Introduces Integration Suite 2005").

Paregam Consulting Joins Ranks of Global Software Resellers

Global Software has a new distributor located in Quebec, Canada. Paregam Consulting Group has partnered with Global Software to resell its Spreadsheet Server for J.D. Edwards/PeopleSoft, Executive DASH, and Budget Manager applications, the Raleigh, North Carolina, software company says. "Our solutions resonate with Paregam Consulting Group, just like they have with tens of other firms all over the world," says Spencer Kupferman, Global's vice president of corporate affairs. Of particular interest to Paregam is Global's Spreadsheet Server, which enables people to use Microsoft Excel to access and update ERP data, in real time. Paregam is ready to get the alliance with Global underway. "Global Software is the real deal," says Vic Balian, Paregam's practice manager, "and their Spreadsheet Server for J.D. Edwards is just what the doctor ordered for a number of Paregam's clients."