Alex Woodie
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Hail Cesar: Italian Manufacturer Modernizes with looksoftware and RPG OA
February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreEuropeans who are remodeling their kitchens may be familiar with Cesar, an Italian manufacturer of modular kitchen components. While Cesar improves the look and utility of 11,000 kitchens per year, the company was struggling to manage orders effectively due to an aging IBM i-based application. After adopting modernization tools from looksoftware, the company is concentrating on kitchens again.
Like many small and midsize Italian firms, Cesar developed its own IBM i application with good old RPG. Its homegrown ERP system handles most aspects of Cesar’s operations, including all accounting and customer, product, and order information.
While the ERP system
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OpenText Buys GXS for $1 Billion
February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCanadian enterprise software giant OpenText last month got a little bigger when it completed its $1.06 billion acquisition of EDI and B2B integration software and cloud services provider GXS. For IBM i shops, the deal is noteworthy in that it includes the TrustedLink EDI software that traces its roots back to Inovis, Harbinger, and Peregrine Software. But this deal is all about the cloud.
When GXS merged with Inovis in 2009, it created a B2B behemoth. At the time, GXS was considered by Forrester to be the top B2B service provider in the world, with more than 8
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Essextec Buys Gemini Systems
February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreEssex Technology Group (Essextec) last month acquired Gemini Systems, a fellow IBM business partner with clients in the Northeast.
Based in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, Essextec sells IBM hardware, including Power Systems, Pure Systems, and storage gear, and provides technical expertise in the area of security, high availability, and cloud delivery. The company has offices throughout the Northeast, and has customers in a variety of industries. Gemini Systems, meanwhile, was founded by Simon Leung in 1987 and is focused on providing IBM solutions to midsize and large companies.
Essextec president Jim Torney says the combination of Essextec’s infrastructure and
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ASCI Ramps Up Migration Effort for Job Scheduler
February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen it comes to IBM i job schedulers, there are a few well-known entities that consistently make the shortlist during product bake-offs. The ActiveBatch offering from Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI) is not a regular on that list. But the company says it’s having success moving users from IBM job schedulers to its own. And with the newly launched migration service, it hopes to have more.
ActiveBatch is an enterprise job scheduler that helps organizations manage workloads running across IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, OpenVMS, and Mac OS environments. The software supports time-based and trigger-based scheduling, and features an
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Congratulations, PHP: You Are Legacy Now
February 17, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreZend Technology is figuring out what IBM figured out a long time ago: that success is a double-edge sword. With an estimated 240 million Web applications powered by PHP and widespread adoption by the Fortune 500, it was just a matter of time before Zend relented to its customers and eased up on the oh-so-hurried three-year upgrade cycle. As of today, Zend is supporting the PHP language and its PHP runtime for a minimum of five years, with the possibility of longer support.
The shift from a three-year support policy to a five-year support policy for PHP and the Zend
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Quadrant Buys BCD Software
February 10, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBacked by the private equity firm Candescent Partners, Quadrant Software today announced the acquisition of Business Computer Design Int’l. and its business partner ExcelSystems Software Development to create one of the larger IBM i software vendors. The companies will continue to operate as they are, no layoffs are planned, and BCD customers will see no immediate changes as a result of the deal, Quadrant CEO Steve Woodard says.
Chicago-based BCD Software and ExcelSystems (ESDI), which is based in British Columbia, Canada, will become entities under the Quadrant brand, joining two other Quadrant companies, SoftBase and NetLert. The combination of
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Come On IBM i Innovators, Step Up And Show Off
February 10, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhat great feats of IBM i innovation have you been party to lately? If you have a story worth sharing with the rest of the IBM i universe, you had better hurry up and submit it for your chance at glory and a COMMON/IBM Power Systems Innovation Award.
Every spring, an Innovation Award is bestowed upon one worthy IBM i shop at the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition event. This year, today, February 10, is the deadline for submitting your application for the 2014 COMMON conference, which is taking place the first week in May in beautiful Orlando, Florida.
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Dropping Soon: IBM’s Big Application Modernization Redbook
February 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreLast year in Rochester, before the Polar Vortex swooped down and turned vast stretches of the Upper Midwest into arctic tundra, IBM convened a meeting of the minds like no other. Big Blue flew in dozens of IBM i modernization experts from all over the world to work on a forthcoming Redbook, with the idea of putting down on paper a complete guide for how to remake existing IBM i apps into sleek and powerful programs that will run businesses for decades to come.
That Redbook is almost complete. According to sources in the IBM i community, we’ll soon get
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IBM Goes Graphical with PowerVP Performance Tool
February 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreAre you getting the most out of your Power Systems server? IBM in December rolled out a new product called Power Virtualization Performance (or PowerVP) that aims to provide a graphical view of the performance of IBM i, AIX, and Linux LPARs in a Power Systems environment. The idea is that, by showing administrators how virtualized workloads are running, they can more effectively detect bottlenecks and other barriers to achieving ultimate Power Systems productivity.
PowerVP pulls data directly from the PowerVM hypervisor, and has the capability to show users exactly which virtual workloads are using specific physical resources on an
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Krengel Soothes RPG to XML Integration Needs
February 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen RPG was first created more than 50 years ago, XML was not even a twinkle in a Web developer’s eye. A lot has changed since then, including the emergence of XML as the lingua franca for commerce on the Web. Despite the difference in age, you can, in fact, use XML with your RPG applications. And with the latest release of Krengel Technology‘s RPG-XML Suite version 3.0, the connection between RPG and XML gets stronger than ever.
RPG-XML Suite is a collection of RPG service programs and APIs that enable IBM i apps to compose, transmit, and parse