• VAI Announces Roadmap for IBM i-Based ERP

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  VAI recently announced that it’s released a roadmap for S2K Enterprise Resource, its IBM i-based ERP software used by small and midsize manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. The company says the roadmap calls for S2K to be enhanced in several areas, including big data, cloud computing, mobile computing, analytics, CRM, and collaboration. VAI says it has a lot of new stuff in the pipeline. Like many ERP software vendors, VAI is working on figuring out the best way to bring new cloud, mobile, and analytic capabilities to its user base. Its customers are also being affected by the so-called “big data”

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• Infor Cuts Price of ION Middleware by Over Half

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor is temporarily reducing the price of its ION Foundation suite by 60 percent. The price cut, which was announced at last week’s Inforum 2012 conference, was made to encourage Infor customers to adopt the middleware component that’s key to the vendor’s product strategy–and just as important for Infor customers that want new functionality. Now through July 31, Infor is offering a one-time discount of 60 percent off the cost of ION Foundation, a suite of tools that includes: ION Connect, an enterprise service bus (ESB) and message broker that’s based on open source, Java Messaging Service (JMS)-based Apache ActiveMQ

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• Cilasoft Ships Authority Manager Tool for IBM i

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are concerned about tracking the activities of IT professionals as they’re logged onto IBM i servers may want to check out the new Elevated Authority Manager (EAM) tool from Cilasoft. The software provides a rich array of options for controlling the use of powerful user profiles, such as those with QSECOFR authority and keeping an organization compliant with government regulations. EAM gives organizations two ways to temporarily grant powerful authorities to IT professionals who need to work on an IBM i server. First, a user can be swapped into a different user profile that contains the necessary

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• Infor Expands Salesforce.com Work as 1st Joint Customer Goes Live

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor and Salesforce.com are working on two new products that will deliver ordering- and marketing-related functionality as part of its joint Inforce line of offerings. And the CEO of the first Infor customer to go live on the generally available Inforce Everywhere product–the IBM i shop C.H. Briggs–shared her thoughts on the importance of integrating front- and back-office functions during last week’s Inforum 2012 conference. C.H. Briggs is the largest independently owned distributor of interior and specialty building products in the U.S. The Reading, Pennsylvania-based company buys building products from 250 manufacturers around world, and sells them to residential and

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• TEMBO Claims Non-Disruptive Migration of IBM i Apps to SQL Engine

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  TEMBO Technology Lab has chosen next week’s COMMON conference as a launch pad for AO Foundation, a new tool designed to automatically modify IBM i applications utilizing DB2/400’s native SQL engine without requiring a recompilation or using surrogates. AO Foundation is the first of several tools the South African company has in the works to help IBM i shops break up their monolithic code bases, rebuild with a multi-tier architecture, and increase the agility of companies in the process. Most of the modernization tools on the IBM i market focus on building GUIs replete with the latest Web technology. This

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• SAP Targets 1 Billion Users And €20 Billion In Sales By 2015

  April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The top brass at German application software giant SAP are just as competitive in the sport of sailing with rival Oracle as they are in the application software business–and are picking up steam in the cloud and databases businesses, too. SAP does not have as large a business on the IBM i platform as Oracle or Infor, but it does nonetheless have a few thousand key customers who are running its various ERP stacks on the progeny of the AS/400. Last week, SAP reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012 ended in March, and overall sales

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• Fax Incentive Program Offered By Quadrant Software

  April 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  Backing up its launch of fax over IP (FoIP) software earlier this month, Quadrant Software has introduced a Quadrant FastFax customer trade-up program that provides a path for companies to migrate from its existing hardware/software combination to QuadraDocV virtual FoIP software. Companies that are staying with the traditional fax hardware setup will find a trade-in discount program as well. The benefit of moving from hardware-based fax is the elimination of hardware management and maintenance and the canceling of subscriptions for analog phone lines. FoIP software runs within a VMware virtual machine. It provides the same fax capabilities as Quadrant’s hardware-based

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• IBM Finds Signs Of Talented Youth At AITP

  April 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  There was something happening here. Aaron Bartell has presented dozens, maybe hundreds, of technical sessions on the local user group circuit and at the notable IBM i conferences like COMMON, DevCon, and the RPG & DB2 Summit. His audiences are diverse, but one thing they aren’t is young. As he looked out at the attendees of his most recent session, he was struck by the change in landscape. Everyone was young. Bartell was presenting a session called “Introduction to Android Development for RPG Programmers” in a classroom of about 40 interested college students at the AITP National

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• IBM Boosts Share Buybacks And Dividend

  April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This was about as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise. IBM‘s top brass are feeling so good about its financial prospects this year that it has once again raised its dividend and asked for and received approval from Big Blue’s board of directors to spend huge piles of cash buying back stock. In a statement last week, new president and CEO, Ginni Rometty, said the board has approved another $7 billion to be spent on share buybacks, adding to an existing authorization from last year that still had $5.7 billion left in the kitty. “We continue in our commitment to deliver

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• Reader Feedback On Third Party’s A Charm For JDE Maintenance Contracts

  April 30, 2012 Hey, Dan

  There’s another issue with going to third-party maintenance for JDE World: operating system upgrades. We looked at dropping World A7.3 maintenance a few years ago. We found out, however, that if we ever wanted to upgrade from i5/OS V5R4 to IBM i 6.1, we needed Oracle to provide us with the proper updated objects so we could run on the new OS. Oracle/JDE was only willing to do that if we stayed on maintenance. And oh, by the way, there is a significant penalty if you get off maintenance and get back on again. So from my point of view,

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