News Briefs and Product Shorts

PeopleSoft Introduces New Application Management Service to All of Its Customers

PeopleSoft announced a series of new services this month for World, EnterpriseOne, and Enterprise shops that want to outsource their technical support functions to the Pleasanton, California, software vendor's Global Services organization. The new suite of services, called Application Management, allows PeopleSoft customers to outsource various technical support functions, and includes individual programs for Maintenance Services, Administration Services, End User Services, and Extended Services. The Maintenance Services offering includes system diagnoses and makes sure PeopleSoft's customers are regularly updated with the latest fixes and patches. PeopleSoft is guaranteeing certain levels of uptime and availability through the Administration Services offering, which will see PeopleSoft employees remotely monitoring key application performance metrics like storage, memory, and job queue utilization. Round-the-clock help desk support is provided under the End User Services offering, which PeopleSoft intends as a supplement to (not a replacement for) its customers' help desk operations. Services rendered under the Extended Services heading include performance tuning, customizations, change control management, and disaster recovery. Application Management services will be offered over secure network lines from PeopleSoft offices in Pleasanton; Chicago; Toronto, Ontario; Madrid, Spain; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and India. The services are available now for customers in the United States and the Asia/Pacific region, and they will become available to customers in Europe early next year.

IGEL Rolls Out 'Premium' Line of 1 GHz Thin Clients

German computer maker IGEL this month introduced its new "Premium" line of high-end thin client computers. Powered by 1 Ghz Via Systems C3 LP processors and driven by IGEL's Flash Linux operating system, the new IGEL-564 Premium and IGEL-5128 Premium thin clients are designed for enterprise GUI, Java, and multimedia applications. The company is selling two IGEL-5128 thin clients, which cost $789 each. The 5128 LX comes with plug-ins for RealNetworks' RealPlayer and the Mplayer, which is a media player written for Linux, while the 5128 LX Enterprise includes a GUI for SAP's ERP application and a full Java runtime environment. IGEL is also selling the 564 LX and the 564 X-Term thin clients, which cost $709 each. The 564 LX device sports a Mozilla Web browser and plug-ins for a media player and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The 564 X-Term lacks the graphical capability and is designed for command-line Unix and Linux applications, accessed via the X11/XDMCP protocol, the company says. The rest of IGEL's Premium line includes support for Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol 5.1, Citrix Independent Computing Architecture, X11/XDMCP, and the PowerTerm suite of 5250, 3270, and VT emulators that IGEL OEMs from Ericom.

Manhattan Associates to OEM eSP's Stay-Linked Middleware

Manhattan Associates is now reselling eBusiness Solutions Pros' wireless terminal emulation middleware under its own house brand. Wireless Application Access, the name under which Manhattan Associates is offering eSP's Stay-Linked software, is a proven and established middleware platform for wirelessly connecting barcode scanners with warehouse or inventory management systems running on OS/400, OS/390, and Unix servers. The company claims that its software, which features a very small thin client program that loads on the scanner and session management software that runs on an OS/400 server, is better at managing the hiccups in radio frequency networks that can result in dropped terminal emulation sessions and cause headaches for both warehouse workers and IT administrators. Manhattan Associates, whose Warehouse Management software for the OS/400 server has set the high-bar for distribution center automation, will configure Wireless Application Access for both the OS/400 and open systems version of its application. Wireless Application Access will work with a variety of barcode scanners, which Manhattan Associates offers through its Hardware Systems Group.

MPG Modeling AIX and Linux Workloads on iSeries; pSeries to Follow

Midrange Performance Group, developer of the Performance Navigator capacity planning tool for the iSeries, is developing new software for modeling AIX and Linux workloads running on iSeries logical partitions. The new product, Power Navigator, is now available for use by IBM business partners, capacity planning professionals, and the occasional end user, says MPG vice president Jim Young. Power Navigator will be delivered as an option with PerfNav and will generate reports and graphs that are very similar in look and feel as those in the PerfNav product. The company will be offering support for AIX and Linux workloads running on IBM's pSeries Unix server immediately following the release of the first version supporting iSeries, Young says. "Our current iSeries partners are very excited about the prospect of being able to use Performance Navigator-like technology in their pSeries practices," he says. Once the company has completed the "what if" workload modeling and hardware selection functions in support of the business partner community, it will work on providing the performance management and problem determination functionality that end users enjoy in PerfNav. Following that, the company will work to collect and model workloads running on other operating systems, such as Sun Microsystems' Solaris or Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Alpha, he says.

Teledyne Standardizing on MAPICS ERP for iSeries

A Los Angeles defense contractor is expanding its use of MAPICS's ERP for iSeries product in an effort to standardize on a single enterprise platform, the Atlanta ERP software vendor announced last week. The Electronics and Communications Segment of Teledyne Technologies has signed a three-site contract that will bring the total number of MAPICS users at Teledyne to more than 1,000. Teledyne says the driving factors in selecting MAPICS software to manage its day-to-day activities was standardizing on a single financial package across its sites. Teledyne designs and manufactures electronic communication and propulsion products and provides advanced engineering services to a variety of customers around the world. The company has been growing quickly through acquisitions and double-digit organic growth, and it had $270 million in revenue in its most recent quarter. The value of the deal was not disclosed, and the implementation is expected to be completed in 18 months.

Agilysys Books on iSeries At Rochester Benchmark Center

In a show of tremendous scalability and performance, a Web-based hotel reservation system from iSeries distributor Agilysys simulated the equivalent of booking every room on the Las Vegas Strip in only three hours during recent tests at the IBM eServer Benchmark Center in Rochester, Minnesota. Actually, the stress tests involved two Agilysys applications, LMS ResNet and ShowNet (both of which were designed with LANSA's development tools and incorporate LANSA's runtime middleware technology), running on an iSeries Model 890 database server and an eServer Model 520 Web server. LANSA says the ResNet hotel booking application and the ShowNet ticket purchasing application reached booking rates of more than 25,000 reservations per hour with no degradation in response time. ShowNet also was able to sell out a simulated 12,000-seat event in less than 30 minutes, while ResNet was able to book 100,000 reservations in four hours, which is more than half the total number of rooms booked in the United States over the Internet on any given day, LANSA points out. "This was a comprehensive test," says Criss Chrestman, director of strategic technology with Agilysys' Enterprise Solutions Group. "The iSeries, our applications, and LANSA all proved to be incredibly scalable."

Shane Software's j.Wizard Suite Works in Non-HA Environments, Too

We told you about the new j.Wizard collection of iSeries utilities that Shane Software recently brought to market (see "Startup Delivers Database Tools for OS/400 HA Environments"). While two the products in that suite, JConStraints and JDBR, have a special applicability for helping administrators to keep mirrored OS/400 servers in synch, that is by no means the only use for the products. Shane Software tells IT Jungle that anybody with a need to check the referential constraints in a DB2/400 database (JConStraints) or to check the relationship of the physical files to the logical files in a DB2/400 database (JDBR) could use these products. The third member of the suite, jReOrg, performs file reorganizations from a graphical interface.