News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Maximum Availability, the upstart OS/400 high-availability software company from New Zealand, landed its first customer in the United States last month. Skechers was looking for an inexpensive way to eliminate downtime as the 2002 back-to-school season approached and shoes needed to be shipped. The company's Ontario, California, distribution center was operating five or six days a week, but strong demand for Skechers shoes meant going 24/7. This created a problem, however, when the IT staff needed to perform backups. The company tried to use the OS/400 Save While Active command, but had problems because someone had to physically walk through the 1.4 million square foot warehouse to tell the 120 workers to log their wireless radio frequency devices off the PkMS warehouse management system, from Manhattan Associates. Skechers' IT staff knew it could eliminate the scheduled downtime by installing a high availability solution, but this would require buying either a second iSeries server or a bigger one with two or more processors. The company's solution, which saved money and eliminated backup problems, included upgrading to OS/400 V5R1, installing Maximum Availability's *noMAX, and adding extra DASD. As a result, Skechers is now able to replicate backup data to a second auxiliary storage pool (ASP), on its single-processor i820, without causing downtime.

• Symtrax last week announced the immediate availability of Symtrax Portal, an application that captures and indexes reports and other documents generated from OS/400, OS/390, Unix, and other legacy systems. Symtrax Portal runs on a Windows 2000 server and monitors local and remote folders accessible to the server. When output arrives, it's indexed and available to specific user groups or profiles. The program can manage input arriving in any number of formats, including PDF, ASCII, Microsoft Office, HTML, and others. For OS/400 systems, the Symtrax Portal indexes iSeries spool reports in their native binary format and compresses them by up to 80 percent, while retaining all the original spool file attributes. To access a report, a user may then search for reports using criteria such as job name, file name, file creation time, or other attributes. Reports are served via Microsoft IIS Server 5.0, and are viewed online using a special viewer that allows users to search for specific values and print results. For more information, go to www.symtrax.com.
  
  
• Baan Process Solutions and Solzon, its Pembroke, New Hampshire, business partner, have co-developed a software tool designed to make PRISM upgrades easier and more efficient. The new tool, called Solzon PRISM Release Organization & Upgrade Tool, or SPROUT, helps to identify the type and amount of effort that will be required to perform an upgrade of PRISM, Baan's popular OS/400-based ERP suite for process manufacturers. SPROUT is supported by analysis reports and cost estimates, and streamlines the upgrade process by monitoring for completeness and success, the companies reported in a joint release. SPROUT is available now and has already helped several customers upgrade to the latest release of the RPG-based suite, PRIMS 7iV1.
  
  
• FormScape recently launched a document management package specifically geared for distributors. FormScape for Distribution Solution combines the basic FormScape package, which allows users to customize the unmodified output from popular ERP packages into more attractive forms or labels; its DocsOnline package, which allows users to access the new forms over the Internet; and the Optical Character Recognition package, which digitizes paper-based content. FormScape said the software package helps the distribution process by reducing the re-keying of data and reducing order-processing time and by automating the generation of dispatch and shipping documents. The Distribution Solution has already seen action at ISA International, a European supplier of computer consumables, which claims to have saved more than $150,000 per year by streamlining some of its processes.
  
  
• HiT Software announced last week that its new ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC SQL middleware products support distributed transactions and static DB2 for OS/400 and mainframe platforms. The San Jose, California, software company said that distributed transaction support lets applications confirm updates to multiple databases before committing a transaction. Without this feature, applications have to update databases individually, and potentially roll back multiple record changes if any single database update fails. The static SQL support allows developers to precompile SQL statements used within an application in order to increase client application performance, to free DB2 server CPU load, and to take advantage of data access plan security, the company said. Find more information on the company's middleware at www.hitsw.com.
  
  
• Car-maker Mazda has gone live on software from Infinium Software that's powering a new human-resources computer system in North America. Mazda North American Operations is using Infinium's next generation, Java-based Human Resources application to allow employees in the company's marketing, customer services, and parts departments to conduct HR-related tasks over the Internet, using a Web browser. According to Infinium, more than 1,200 Mazda employees at 700 locations now have access to corporate information from Mazda over the Internet.
  
  
• CommercialWare, a leading developer of enterprise software for multi-channel retailers, announced its intention last week to be among the first providers of enterprise software for multi-channel retailers to deliver its software as Web services. The Natick, Massachusetts, company, whose software runs on the OS/400 platform, provided no specific guidance as to when we can expect to see Web-services-enabled software, except to say that market researcher Gartner says that Web services is expected to become the dominant mode of deployment for new application solutions by 2004.
  
  

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