News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Who says the iSeries can't attract new customers? Jenson USA, a direct marketer of mountain bikes and accessories based in Ontario, California, is installing an iSeries-based software package for retailers. It will replace a system running on the Microsoft Windows NT and Hewlett-Packard HP3000 platforms. Last week CommerialWare, the Natick, Massachusetts, provider of multi-channel retail systems, announced that Jenson USA was one of the first customers to migrate from Ecometry's HP3000-based software suite as part of a targeted replacement program. Jenson USA, which sells bikes and accessories through a quarterly catalog, a Web site, and--later this year--through its first retail store, turned to CommercialWare for its order management, customer service, fulfillment, analytics, and integration applications. The bike company will use CWDirect for order management, fulfillment, inventory, and customer service, and will use CWData for business intelligence and CWIntegrate to integrate the CommercialWare suite with other core applications at the company.

• Engineers from Internet security expert Symantec were on hand at the COMMON conference in Indianapolis last week to demonstrate its forthcoming Enterprise Firewall for iSeries. Symantec is still putting the finishing tweaks on its iSeries Firewall, which will run a hardened version of the Linux operation system in a logical partition. Enterprise Firewall for iSeries is what Symantec calls a "hybrid firewall," which means it combines elements of three other types of more rudimentary firewalls--including basic packet filtering, packet inspection, and full application inspection (or proxy) types of firewalls--into a single product. Symantec's Enterprise Firewall for iSeries, which uses the same code base that Symantec deploys on Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system, is a third-generation firewall, and claims it is the only firewall on the market that could have resisted the recently discovered flaw in the Sendmail e-mail server software. Symantec announced its Enterprise Firewall for iSeries nearly a year ago (see "Symantec to Deliver Hardened Linux Firewall for iSeries"), and is expected to deliver the product sometime in the second half of 2002. Security is a touchy subject among high-end OS/400 shops--not to mention at IBM's iSeries labs in Rochester, Minnesota--and now Symantec is saying it will ship the Enterprise Firewall for iSeries sometime in the second quarter of 2003.
  
  
• Legato Systems last week announced OS/400 support for EmailXtender, its application that captures, indexes, and archives e-mail, instant messages, and attachments. EmailXtender ensures compliance with federal rules regarding record retention and promotes the responsible use of instant messaging, which is blossoming at businesses across the world. According to IDC, more than 17 million business workers worldwide used enterprise IM products in 2002, and that number is expected to increase to nearly 60 million by 2004. EmailXtender maintains secure access and prevents even authorized administrative personnel from altering stored e-mails or instant messages. In addition to IBM Lotus Notes on OS/400, EmailXtender supports Microsoft Exchange, Sendmail, and Bloomberg mail programs.
  
  
• At the COMMON conference in Indianapolis last week, ezRAD.com announced the general availability of PalmView/400, a program that allows users to view DB2/400 data from a PalmPilot. PalmView/400 lets users view DB2/400 data in real time, if there is a wireless Internet connection from the Palm Pilot to the OS/400 server. The product supports 128-bit encryption to secure active sessions. If there is no wireless Internet connection, PalmPilot users will be able to use the cradle to synchronize the PalmPilot with the DB2/400 database and view the data in off-line mode. ezRAD.com announced PalmView/400 at the fall COMMON conference in Denver (see "Performance Tool Developer Breaks New Ground with PalmView/400"), and is now selling licenses for the product for $8,995. PalmView/400 is the first shrink-wrapped product to emerge from ezRAD.com, the Baldwinsville, New York, brain child of Mike Boadway. Boadway is the principle developer of the Workload Performance Series suite of application performance tools sold by MB Software & Consulting.
  
  
• Unity Enterprise Solutions last week launched new ODBC middleware for extracting data from J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware ERP systems. The new drivers are designed to allow Windows servers and other client applications, such as Microsoft Excel and Crystal Decisions Crystal Reports, to access WorldSoft ERP data for external query and reporting, business intelligence, data warehousing, data mining, and decision support programs. The company, which launched a similar ODBC driver for J.D. Edwards OneWorld environment last summer, says its new WorldSoft ODBC driver has the capability to work with the World-defined library list; to expose the full file and field descriptions; to auto-link to the UDC file to give virtual fields with UDC descriptions; to process the World date and numeric data correctly; to expose any configured vocabulary overrides and language preferences; and to integrate with the J.D. Edwards security and Data Dictionary configuration. Unity, a British software company, is offering free trial downloads of its J.D. Edwards ODBC drivers at www.jdedirect.com.
  
  
• Information Availability Institute, an offshoot of Lakeview Technology, announced at the COMMON show in Indianapolis last week that it will be holding 40 free workshops on availability and business continuity across the United States and Canada this year. Chris Bartley, managing director of IAI, says the workshops will help attendees learn how to achieve optimum levels of availability in their organizations. "We give a straightforward, unbiased approach to evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of all the types of availability solutions on the market--SAN, NAS, Hot sit, Replication, Switch-disk, etc.," he says. IAI also announced additional two-day courses on several topics, including business availability strategies, optimizing server availability, and iSeries storage resiliency, among others. Lakeview launched IAI at the fall COMMON show in Denver, and today the two organizations are doing their best to separate themselves. IAI has a series of classes scheduled in major cities around the world. For more information, go to www.availabilityinstitute.org.
  

Sponsored By DCSOFTWARE

Go… FASTER! Without an upgrade! Your AS/400 or iSeries machine has been slowing down. You added disk and that helped…for a while. You can't reorganize your files because of the long file locks. You can't purge and archive all that old data because you don't have the programs and you don't have the time to write them. DCSoftware has the tools to get your performance back where it should be…on your schedule, without programming, without locking files, and without a hardware upgrade! ReorgWizard™ - Reorganize files any time - without locking users out of the system. Reorganize whenever you want to - without locking files and without adversely affecting other jobs on the system. ARCTOOLS/400™ - Purge and archive old data without programming and without locking users out of the system. For more information or a free trial, visit www.arctools.com or call 877-ARCTOOLS.