Alex Woodie
-
Bank Finds Scheduling Salvation in the Robot
March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAs a Jack Henry & Associates‘ customer, Alpine Bank deferred on many items to the provider of its core banking system. But when it came time to eliminate slack from the schedule, Alpine Bank brought in the Robot/SCHEDULE product from HelpSystems.
iSeries administrator Susan DeRocher is one of three staffers at Alpine Bank, a 39-year-old financial institution based in western Colorado. DeRocher and company oversee SilverLake, the popular IBM i-based core processing system from Jack Henry that is used by many midsized banks and credit unions across the nation.
But in many instances, SilverLake was calling the shots.
-
IBM’s Unveils Uber MFT Suite to End All MFT Suites
March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last week unveiled a new collection of managed file transfer (MFT) software products that it says addresses the changing ways that organizations are accessing and moving data inside and outside the enterprise.
The way that organizations are moving data with MFT is changing, IBM says. Instead of focusing on MFT technology and system-to-system transfers, the emphasis is now on the business use cases and ensuring operational visibility and adherence to governance.
Enter IBM Connect:Direct Advanced 1.0, a new superset of MFT products designed to address the changing MFT landscape. The offering combines all of IBM’s strategic system-centric MFT products
-
Consider Tokenization to Avoid PCI Stress
March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIf your retail operations put you under the jurisdiction of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), you are likely experiencing a considerable amount of stress. You have sophisticated cyber criminals gunning for your sensitive data on the one hand, and foaming-at-the-mouth auditors looking to flag the smallest misconfigured setting on the other. What’s an IBM i administrator to do? If you talk to the folks at Liaison Technologies, the topic of tokenization as a service, or TaaS, will soon be broached.
Liaison sells an all-inclusive data security product called Liaison Protect that includes encryption, tokenization, and
-
Jim Sloan Steps Back from TAA Productivity Tools
March 17, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreJim Sloan, the one-man development dynamo who has been writing IBM i utilities since the days of the System/38, has sold his company, Jim Sloan Inc., to a new group of owners. For now, the former IBMer will stay on as consultant to the new company, which will continue to expand and sell the popular group of utilities.
The new ownership of TAA Tools was announced via a note on the company’s website. Sloan has agreed to stay on as a consultant, but the company has two new owner/developers to help build the product set: David Dykstal and Sue
-
Cloud ERP Deployments Declined In 2013, Panorama Says
March 10, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe number of organizations adopting cloud-based ERP dropped in 2013 after three years of steady increases, according to Panorama Consulting‘s annual global survey of ERP deployments. While the numbers are just a snapshot of a complex and dynamic market, they indicate that customers may not be as interested in cloud-based ERP if they won’t reap big cost savings (which Panorama says they won’t).
Here are the raw numbers from Panorama. In last year’s report on 172 ERP deployments around the world, Panorama reported that 61 percent of them were of the traditional, on-premise variety, 14 percent were deployed as
-
SAP HANA: Just a Sidecar to IBM i, For Now
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIt’s been about three years since SAP unveiled HANA to the world. And while the in-memory database platform currently only runs on X64 commodity hardware and not IBM‘s Power processor, SAP’s extensive IBM i customer base is starting to explore ways that HANA might fit into an SAP implementations running on Power Systems and IBM i.
Ron Schmerbauch, IBM’s technical lead for SAP on IBM i implementation, recently wrote about the possible integration options between IBM i and HANA. Currently, there are only two ways that HANA and IBM i can play together, Schmerbauch says: HANA as an analytical
-
Alaska Telecom Ditches Tape for LaserVault UBD
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCopper Valley Telecom, a small telephone company that serves the city of Valdez, Alaska, has left behind the hassles of tape and embraced the simplicity of disk-to-disk backups. Since adopting the LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD) to backup its production IBM i server, the company is enjoying significantly faster and more automated backups. And thanks to LaserVault UBD’s Web interface, IT staffers no longer fumble around with tapes when the company needs to build a test environment.
Prior to implementing the LaserVault UBD, Copper Valley used a 24-slot IBM tape library to back up the data stored on its IBM
-
Google’s New Login Is ‘Slick,’ But Will It Fly in the Enterprise?
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreGoogle last month acquired SlickLogin, an Israeli security startup that developed an innovative login process that authenticates individuals by using a smartphone to capture sound waves generated by a requesting app. The technology has the potential to eliminate reliance on passwords, which everybody can agree is a good thing. But is the technology ready for primetime? Security expert Patrick Townsend chimes in.
SlickLogin debuted just six months ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco. Evidentially, the technology (born of the Israeli Defense Force’s elite cyber security unit) made such an impact on the Google folks down the
-
Halcyon Gives IBM i Shops an Edge in MQ Management
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHalcyon Software last week rolled out MQ Manager, a new piece of software designed to help IBM i shops manage their IBM WebSphere MQ environments. The new product sports a Web-based user interface, and is designed to alert administrators to any potential problems that might pop up in their production MQ systems.
Originally launched 23 years ago as MQ Series, IBM’s message queuing technology is the digital backbone for critical IT systems at big companies around the world. WebSphere MQ (as it was renamed in 2002) provides guaranteed one-time, asynchronous delivery of ASCI and EBCDIC messages across a variety of
-
IBM Aims to Smooth DevOps with RTC Update
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last week shipped a new release of its Rational Team Concert (RTC) product that should help to streamline and automate the fast pace of today’s DevOps environments–in particular those aiming for continuous delivery. Among the IBM i-functionality, improvements in the product’s dependency build and promotion capabilities top the list. In addition to RTC 4.06, Big Blue also gave us new releases of Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Quality Manager products.
RTC is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool launched more than five years ago that allows teams of developers to work together more efficiently. The product offers source code