News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Saddam Hussein and his minions in Iraq won't be gaining access to strong encryption with their TN5250 emulation software anytime soon, and neither will those in other "axis of evil" countries, such as Iran and North Korea (not to mention the un-friendlies in Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, and Angola). Zephyr Development has been cleared by the federal government to begin exporting, for the first time, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) enabled versions of its PASSPORT Web-to-Host and PASSPORT PC-to-Host terminal emulation software to any country in the world, besides these notable exceptions. The news hit in mid-December, when Zephyr announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce had cleared the Houston software company to begin exporting stronger than 64-bit SSL encryption with its TN3270, TN5250, and VT/100/VT220 terminal emulation software for mainframes, OS/400 servers, and Unix servers respectively. Zephyr licenses its encryption technology from RSA Security.

• Another i890 server has been installed, this one at the De Soto, Kansas, operations of Huhtamaki, a manufacturer of packaging materials. Huhtamaki, a division of the Finland-based company Huhtamaki Oyj, which had revenues of EUR 2.4 billion (or about U.S. $2.5 billion at current exchange rates) in 2001, grew quickly through mergers and acquisitions during the late 1990s. At the same time, the number of Intel servers grew quickly at the company as well, resulting in an unacceptable 12-hour daily backup window. With an hour of unplanned downtime potentially costing the company $10 million, the company knew it had to do something to get a handle on the sprawl of Wintel servers threatening disaster. Enter IBM and its new iSeries Model 890, a mainframe-class server. Sirius Computer Solutions, a San Antonio, Texas, reseller, assisted Huhtamaki in the engagement and helped design a new server architecture that used OS/400's logical partitioning (LPAR) capabilities to consolidate the growing number of OS/400 applications. Additionally, the plan called for a combination of Integrated xSeries Servers and Integrated xSeries Adapters to bring Huhtamaki's Windows-based servers from Compaq into the secure folds of the i890. As a result, the company has seen a 75 percent reduction in the time it takes to run backups, and it doesn't need as many administrators to baby-sit the Wintel boxes. Read the complete IBM brief (in PDF format).
  
  
• Assist Cornerstone will be rolling out a new version of its multi-channel order management system, AssistV9, over the next few months. AssistV9, like previous versions of the company's flagship product, will run on AS/400 and iSeries hardware. New features in AssistV9 include a Web-based reporting engine, enhanced analytics, a CRM portal, and a Reverse Logistics module for managing customer returns. Modules returning for version 9.0 include eCommerce, Order Entry, Customer Management, Direct Marketing, Campaign Tracking, Invoicing, Inventory Management, Purchasing, and Accounting. The latest version will be entering beta tests near the end of the first quarter, with the first customer shipments expected by the second quarter. For more info, go to www.assistintl.com.
  
  
• Business Computer Design Int'l is having a software sale. The Chicago company last week announced that it is offering 20-to-50-percent discounts on its software through January 24. The discounts cover eight of the company's products, including ProGen WebSmart, Catapult, Spool Explorer, EZ-Pickin's, and Nexus, which will each be discounted by 20 percent. ProGen Plus, one of the company's development products, will be discounted by 33 percent, while File-Flash and Docu-Mint, two programmer utilities, get the full 50 percent discount. Eric Figura, BCD's manager of sales and marketing, says the sale is designed to get sales activity off to a good start in 2003, following a better-than-expected fourth quarter, in which, he said, earnings were 30 percent better than the company had expected. The 30-day-free trial period that BCD offers with all of its software is still valid during this promotion.
  
  
• Companies have one week left to take advantage of the Java servlet offer made by OS/400 development tool vendor mrc in December. Anybody who's interested in exploring Java servlet technology has until January 15 to submit to mrc their specifications, for which they will receive one working Java servlet application per company. "It's a chance for users to see for themselves what Java servlet performance is all about, and what it is like when using their own files," says Heather Gately, marketing manager for mrc, based near Chicago. The first five companies to get their specs to mrc will be allowed to keep their new Java servlet application at no cost whatsoever, while latecomers need only pay the cost of developing the servlet (instead of paying the license fee) to receive the right to use it. Go to mrc's Web site, at www.mrc-productivity.com/forms/M21070GC.mrc, to sign up.
  
  
• Are you finding it difficult to determine what sort of network response times your users are experiencing on the LAN or WAN, compared with the total response times users see during OS/400 interactive sessions? If you are, then you might want to take a look at a new product that INPRO International announced late last year. TestIP/400 shows the minimum, maximum, and average response times from a user's terminal to the central OS/400 server. INPRO says that TIP/400 uses APIs to determine IP addresses, rather than requiring users to know them, and it is the only host OS/400 method of separating the network component of response time from the processing component of response time. Licenses for TIP/400 version 0.1.0 are available now for $99.
  

Sponsored By MB SOFTWARE & CONSULTING

MB Software provides performance and systems management tools for analyzing the underlying performance issues within your application software. Using the Workload Performance Series, you can identify the critical issues that are causing long running batch jobs or slow response time. Many OS/400 environments are faced with interactive feature card upgrades or overall system upgrades to accommodate the CPU, I/O and memory demands of your application software. Fix the underlying issues and need less hardware! See CPU by line of source code, identify logical files needed for efficient SQL, shrink journals for successful high availability, clean up disk space and more. . . Application optimization using Workload Performance Series software. Monitor and resolve random interactive response time issues Cut duration of long running batch jobs using CPU by line of source code Improve performance of SQL based applications with new logical files Optimize High Availability implementations by reducing size of journals Go to www.mb-software.com to register for a free demo and performance review.