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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.

  • Confused About BI? Get the mrc BI Feature Guide

    July 9, 2013 Alex Woodie

    We are in the midst of a business intelligence (BI) revolution. Exotic data stores like NoSQL and Hadoop and massive in-memory systems like Hana are giving big organizations incredible analytical capabilities. But these solutions are overkill for most smaller shops. For a small shop dipping its toe in the BI waters for the first time, mrc offers a refresher course on the essential features.

    In its guide, titled “Essential Features of a Good Business Intelligence Solution,” mrc gets back to BI basics. What constitutes a good BI architecture? What are the must-have BI features? What advanced features would be nice

    …

    Read more
  • Jinfonet Hones JReport with Visual Analysis, Big Data Connections

    July 9, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Jinfonet Software last week unveiled a new version of JReport, its Java-based reporting and analysis tool. Version 12 brings a new in-memory visual analysis features, as well as support for big data platforms like Amazon RedShift.

    JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that is often embedded into other Web applications. The software–which not only can pull data from DB2 for i but run on the IBM i server itself–includes a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module, a dashboard module, and mobile interfaces.

    The Rockville, Maryland, software company introduced

    …

    Read more
  • Enterprise App Store Approach to Spread for Mobile Apps, Study Says

    July 9, 2013 Alex Woodie

    The adoption rate of enterprise app stores by large organizations will grow at more than a 30 percent annual rate, according to a recent study by ABI Research. The growth is being driven by the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, the firm says.

    The app store concept was popularized by Apple several years ago as an easier way to browse, download, and install applications on mobile devices, such as its iPhone and iPad. Google followed with Google Play for its Android platform. Even Microsoft has its own store, for Windows 8.

    But it’s not just consumer games

    …

    Read more
  • Keeping Time With Marisol Guzman, CEO Of Timesoft

    July 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Marisol Guzman wasn’t like most teenagers. Growing up in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, she preferred working odd programming jobs over attending high school. And instead of going to college, the budding entrepreneur instead founded her own software company, Timesoft, which continues to sell and develop time and attendance software for IBM i and Windows 20 years later.

    You could say that time seemed in short supply for young Guzman, who stopped going to high school after her first semester of senior year (she did eventually graduate). While her classmates were more interested in typical teenager-type stuff–you know,

    …

    Read more
  • Under Constellation, Friedman Assembles IBM i Assets

    June 27, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Infor may have the most well-known collection of IBM i ERP systems, but there are other such groups of IBM i assets, particularly for tier-two applications. One such grouping of tier-two software vendors is the ongoing work of Friedmann, the developer of ERP for windows and door makers that is owned by the mega software conglomerate Constellation Software.

    Friedman has been owned by Constellation for many years. But it’s only been over the last several years that Friedman has been let loose to gobble up IBM i software companies. The list of IBM i-related acquisitions (including date acquired)

    …

    Read more
  • Migrate Your 5250 Emulator Settings to ACS 1.1.2

    June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

    The new Access Client Solutions (ACS) bundle of tools became generally available as part of IBM‘s refresh of the OS refresh in late May. One of the biggest changes IBM made between the tech preview and the GA release is the capability to migrate your existing 5250 settings–including all of your custom macros–into the new Java-based emulator.

    ACS is the new Java-based member of the IBM i Access product family that IBM delivered last year as a technology preview along with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) 4.

    The newly available Access Client Solutions (ACS) provides a lightweight 5250

    …

    Read more
  • VRTech Offers VTL Backup Software for IBM i

    June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that are looking for a better disaster recovery (DR) solution than tape may want to check out the latest virtual tape library (VTL) software from VRTech. VTLBackup4i, which was unveiled in 2012, allows organizations to back up their IBM i libraries to another IBM i server, or to a Windows network drive or network attached storage (NAS) device, using the FTP protocol. The offering provides faster backups than tape, and delivers geographic separation for disaster protection.

    While disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solutions are growing in popularity, tape is still the most prominent DR protection method. Although use

    …

    Read more
  • HiT Bolsters DBMoto Data Engine with Support for HP Vertica

    June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that are interested in pumping their latest DB2/400 database transactions into a Vertica data warehouse for analysis may want to check out the latest release of DBMoto from HiT Software. The San Jose, California, company added Vertica Analytics Database, Hewlett-Packard‘s big data platform and Hadoop killer, as a supported target with version 8 of DBMoto.

    Vertica is a column-oriented database designed to manage large volumes of data as part of a data warehouse or other query-oriented workload. HP bought the company behind the product for an undisclosed sum back in 2011 to go up against

    …

    Read more
  • ARCAD Keeps Customized JDE World Environments on the Straight and Narrow

    June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

    JD Edwards World shops that make a lot of customizations and modifications to their ERP environments may be interested in knowing that ARCAD Software just announced that its application lifecycle management (ALM) tool is fully compatible with World A9.3, the latest release from Oracle.

    ERP modifications are a two-edged sword. While they can give your organizations an edge on the one hand, they can also complicate future maintenance work and upgrades on the other. For this reason, most modern-day ERP vendors strongly discourage their customers from modifying the code.

    But modifications have been a tradition for JD Edwards World

    …

    Read more
  • Symtrax Touts Dashboard Control and Flexibility with StarQuery

    June 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Organizations will no longer have to choose between flexibility and control when deploying business intelligence reporting tools according to Symtrax, which last week unveiled a new release of its StarQuery BI solution that it says will eliminate compromises.

    All too often, organizations are forced between a rock and a hard place when deploying business intelligence. Strong central control is viewed as a necessary element for organizations that value knowing who is accessing what data, when they access it, and how often they access it. On the other end of the spectrum are on-demand and Web-based BI tools that give

    …

    Read more

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