News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Electronic Storage Corp. has announced it will be displaying the latest release of its LaserVault Universal Server at the IBM iSeries Technology Conference being held this week in Las Vegas. The new release, LaserVault Universal Server 5.5, will feature full-text indexing through the LaserVault Web interface. Electronic Storage Corp. says that by automatically prebuilding the indexes of every stored report, it will remove the need for a systems administrator or operator to manually identify the values, or keys, to enable reports to be searchable by users.
  

• A new study from Aberdeen Group spells trouble for expensive, prepackaged CRM implementations, and could indicate a new groundswell of support for CRM lite applications such as those that are often based on IBM Lotus Domino technology. The key finding of the report, titled "Customer Relationship Management: Mid-Market Holds Surprises," shows a vast gulf exists between what software vendors are charging for their CRM software and what users are willing to pay. "If CRM suppliers are to engage smaller enterprises, they need to streamline their production and implementation strategies, as well as better educate users on the value of the CRM suite," says Denis Pombriant, vice president and managing director of Aberdeen's CRM practice.
  
  
• PentaSafe Security Technologies recently announced it is packaging its security solutions into a new, integrated suite of software. PentaSafe says its new VigilEnt Enterprise Security Application suite will address security concerns having to do with policy and awareness, user administration, and vulnerability. The modules in this suite will include VigilEnt Policy Center, VigilEnt User Manager, VigilEnt Security Manager, and VigilEnt Intrusion Manager. While the other three solutions have been available on the market, PentaSafe's new VigilEnt Intrusion Manager, which is scheduled for general availability this September, is designed to automate and manage the detection, correlation, prevention, and response to security concerns for heterogeneous IT environments.
  
  
• The planned merger between iSeries decision-management software provider Fair, Isaac & Company and HNC Software has drawn the attention of the Department of Justice. San Rafael, California, based Fair, Isaac announced it has received a request from the DoJ for additional information relating to the merger. Despite the announcement, the two companies still expect their merger will close during the third quarter of 2002, as they had previously announced.
  
  
• Inter-American Data has become a reseller for Infinium Software's OS/400-based ERP software, Infinium announced last week. Inter-American Data's OS/400-based Lodging Management System is used by some of the largest hotels and casinos in the country. Likewise, Infinium's ERP software enjoys a comfortable position in the hospitality industry and is used by 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the hospitality industry, approximately 90 percent of the hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, and 100 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the gaming industry, according to Infinium. As part of its OEM agreement with Infinium, Inter-American Data plans to sell, support, and provide training for some of the core accounting modules of Infinium's Financial Management application for smaller North American hotels, Infinium said.
  
  
• IBM last week announced a seven-year outsourcing deal with Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada that could be worth $161.5 million. The deal, expected to be finalized next month, includes hosting Sun Life's zSeries and iSeries applications, including e-mail services, Lotus Notes applications, network security, Web hosting, and disaster recovery. The deal would also provide employment for about 120 Sun Life IT staffers.
  
  
• Vision Solutions recently announced that, as part of its expansion into Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, it has appointed Vedran Batos as its new regional director of Emerging Markets and the Middle East. Batos, who has 18 years of industry experience at Euronet Worldwide, Hitachi, and Polytechnic of Dubrovnik, and a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia, is expected to provide sales, marketing, and organizational expertise.
  
  

What does the future hold for RPG applications? If you asked iSeries software vendor California Software, the answer would be Windows and Unix servers and Microsoft's .NET strategy. California Software last week announced it is stepping up to the plate to fill what it claims is IBM’s lack of effectiveness in providing a future for RPG and the iSeries. "Developers are frustrated with a lack of leadership from IBM and the future of the RPG language," said Carol Conway, president of the Irvine, California, software company. In February, the company announced that its BABY/iSeries, Unibol400, and Unibol36 application rehosting tools will be integrated with Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET development environment.

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Take the guesswork out of iSeries DASD Management with disk/HUNTER Why wait until your system slows down or stops because a run-away query eats up your disk space? Many application and database problems can lead to disk spikes, including: Database queries that create large, temporary indexes (access paths) Database queries that create large temporary spaces to implement hash joins or grouping Applications that use heap storage but do not free it (memory leaks) Java-based applications that create a large number of objects but that do not get reclaimed because of dangling object references Applications that use the Integrated File System (IFS) and create large stream files but do not always delete them when they are done Users who create copies of data in IFS as backups not realizing how much disk space they consume Jobs caught in an infinite loop writing printing and creating very large spool files Applications that write to log files that do not get cleared often or at all Data collected by IBM performance and trace tools Once installed and configured, disk/HUNTER runs continuously in the background on your AS/400 iSeries, and “wakes up” at intervals that you specify. Every time disk/HUNTER wakes up, it will measure the amount of free space remaining within specified ASPs or all ASPs. When the amount of free space decreases by a user-specified percentage or by a user-specified amount (in megabytes or gigabytes), disk/HUNTER will go to work, generating messages and reports pointing to the origination of the spike. The combination of detection and diagnostic capabilities within disk/HUNTER provides a powerful element of control to iSeries shops that experience high levels of activity and that also need to be proactive in managing storage. To really see how disk/HUNTER can be both an insurance policy and a time-saver in your shop, click here to download a demo or order a no-charge 30-day support-assisted trial evaluation.