Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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Filipino Retailer Widens JDA MMS Investment
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
Robinsons Retail Holdings, a chain of more than 1,000 retail outlets in the Philippines, is expanding its use of JDA Software Group‘s IBM i-based Merchandise Management System (MMS) as part of a company-wide modernization push.
MMS doesn’t get a lot of press from JDA’s corporate office in Scottsdale, Arizona, these days, as the company focuses its efforts on developing and selling enterprise software for retail chains that runs on commodity servers. But the company has an extensive customer base of nearly 400 MMS customer that remains loyal to the product, which traces its roots back to the early days
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Two More Customer Wins for Vault400
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
United Computer Group recently announced it has signed agreements with Digi-Star International and Harbor Footwear to provide the company with online backup and recovery services via its Vault400 offering.
Digi-Star is a Wisconsin-based company that supplies a variety of electronics to farmers all over the world. The company makes electronic sensing equipment, precision sensors, displays and software used by farmers and others to precisely measure and analyze data from farming processes.
In February, UCG announced that Digi-Star has selected Vault400 to protect its IBM i infrastructure. Digi-Star runs the JD Edwards World ERP system from Oracle. According to UCG,
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Fresche Legacy Automates DDS to DDL Conversions
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that are looking to modernize their database by converting old DDS files to the newer DDL standard may want to check out the latest release of the X-Analysis tool from Fresche Legacy‘s Databorough division. With X-Analysis version 10, the vendor says it has automated much of the work involved with the database modernization process, and will make it easier for IBM i shops to take advantage of the power and extensibility of SQL processing.
For IBM i shops that have made the decision that moving to DDL and the SQE engine are important goals, the new
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Vanguard IMS-21: Now with More Metadata
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that are on the hunt for a content management system may want to check out the latest software from Vanguard Systems, which last month issued the latest release of its IMS-21 suite for IBM i and Windows. With IMS-21 version 7.1, the company has spruced up its interface, expanded its collection of metadata, and bolstered integration with other products. The company also unveiled its new Accounts Payable (AP) Automation solution.
IMS-21 is a document storage and workflow management system designed to help organizations streamline their handling of documents, specifically in the areas of scanning, archiving, workflow
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Infor’s CloudSuite for AWS: What it Means to IBM i Customers
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
You can count Infor among the software vendors who are setting up a software as service (SaaS) business within the confines of Amazon‘s massive data center. The software giant’s IBM i-based ERP products won’t be running here–Amazon Web Services is an Intel-only affair for the new Infor CloudSuite offering unveiled last week–but you can bet that Infor will be positioning the cloud products favorably to at last part of its IBM i installed base.
Infor isn’t new to the SaaS or cloud-hosting business. Like all major ERP vendors, it has partnered with various private cloud providers to give its
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Profound Nabs Patent for Browser-Based Development Tool
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
A round of applause is in order for the good folks of Dayton, Ohio–not for the University of Dayton’s impressive run in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, although they do deserve a nod. No, the midrange server community should be impressed with the patent that was recently issued to the Dayton-based application modernization software company Profound Logic for the innovative way it built an IBM i development tool that runs in a Web browser.
Development tools are normally thought of as being too memory intensive or bulky to fit within the relatively narrow confines of a Web browser. The amount
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Linoma Delivers MFT Client for Android and iOS
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
Let’s face it: Business users can’t always get to a full PC to handle important tasks. And in this bring-your-own-device (BYOD) age, they shouldn’t have to. Thanks to new software unveiled last month by Linoma Software, users who find themselves needing to move files to and from the IBM i server can now do so from the comfort of their mobile iOS or Android devices.
GoAnywhere File Transfer is a new iOS and Android app from Linoma that works with its GoAnywhere Services managed file transfer (MFT) product, which runs on IBM i hosts and other servers. The new
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Townsend Taps Tieto to Resell IBM i Security Tools
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
Townsend Security‘s Alliance AES/400 encryption solution for IBM i is among the products now being sold by Tieto, the big IT services firm covering Northern Europe.
Tieto is a publicly traded IT services firm based in Finland that had about €1.7 billion in revenues last year and employs 15,000 people. The IBM business partner provides customers in the Nordic region with IBM i and AIX services for their Power Systems platform, and it also sells access to its Power-based iTAP cloud platform, which runs IBM i.
The partnership with Townsend brings Tieto several IBM i security solutions that
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Actifio Nabs $100M to Fight Copy Data
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
Venture capital’s obsession with big data was on full display last month, with Hadoop leaders Cloudera and Hortonworks together bringing in $260 million in funding. But the VC love extended beyond analytics, as demonstrated by Actifio’s $100 million oversubscribed round of funding.
Actifio develops a block-level object file system that centralizes a customer’s data, thereby eliminating the need to store multiple copies of data. Studies show that companies have between 13 and 120 copies of their data stored in various silos around the enterprise, including production, backup, data warehousing, development, and test. Large sums of money are spent managing, replicating,
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Rocket Nabs Trubiquity for MFT
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
Rocket Software added another horse to its software stable last month when it announced the acquisition of Trubiquity, a Michigan-based provider of managed data file transfer (MFT), EDI, and data integration software.
Founded nearly 20 years ago, Trubiquity built a successful business catering to the data integration, process automation, and project collaboration needs of 6,500-plus customers in the aerospace, manufacturing, retail, finance, healthcare, and consumer goods industries. The company says its tools process about a million transactions per month for its customers in 40 countries around the world.
The acquisition of Trubiquity brings Rocket several new products, including its