Alex Woodie
-
IBM to Resell ARCAD’s IBM i Tools as Rational Power Pack
April 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last week announced that it is now distributing several of ARCAD Software‘s IBM i change management tools along with its Rational Team Concert product. IBM’s announcement of the ARCAD–Rational Power Pack is a tremendous win for ARCAD, and a validation of a decision it made years ago to pursue a Rational-centric strategy.
ARCAD made a decision two years ago to stop competing against IBM and its Rational Team Concert (RTC) product, which IBM launched in late 2008 to provide source control, change management, and build management capabilities.
While other change management software vendors continued to compete with IBM
-
Halcyon Updates Swath of IBM i Sys Management Tools
April 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHalcyon Software got a few things off its plate at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas, last week. To be exact, the UK-based software firm delivered three new versions of IBM i systems management tools, including Job Scheduler, Authority Swapper, and Document Management System.
The Halcyon folks were good sports at the COMMON show last week, despite losing vice president of sales John Dominic to Maxava just prior to the show, and despite the fact that their entire booth was somehow lost in the mail. While attendees were rightfully impressed with Halcyon’s cardboard-based presentation device, IT Jungle is more interested
-
User m-Power-ment, Delivered with Dashboards
April 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn the epic struggle between users and developers, there is a stream of thought among developers that anything they can do to get users out of their hair must be a good and decent thing. To that end, mrc last week unveiled a new feature called user-defined dashboards to its flagship Java Web app generator, m-Power.
Saving developers time and effort has been a goal of michaels, ross, and cole ever since the days when its 4GL environment, Productivity Series, was generating gobs of RPG for clients all over the world. But instead of outputting green-screen 5250 programs, today’s mrc
-
Polish Processing Bureau Taps Raz-Lee for IBM i Security Tools
April 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreComarch, the Polish IT services firm, has acquired a license to Raz-Lee Security‘s IBM i security suite to help protect the i5/OS environment it manages for customers.
Comarch is a Krakow-based company that provides a range of IT services across multiple industries, including ERP management, security, business intelligence, and CRM. The company, which has 3,500 employees, services customers across central Europe, from Russia in the east to Belgium in the west, and it also has offices in the US and the Middle East.
Among the company’s offerings is an insurance processing service that runs on hosted i5/OS machines.
-
Oracle Unveils In-Memory Applications for JD Edwards
April 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOracle last week announced a slew of new in-memory applications that will be delivered across its line of ERP and CRM suits. The new in-memory offerings include two JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications that will run in-memory on its new line of all-in-one Engineered Systems.
Oracle has come under pressure from rival SAP to bolster its in-memory offerings, particularly after SAP announced in January that its HANA in-memory database can now be used to run transaction and analytic workloads simultaneously on the same server.
Oracle isn’t trying to combine transactional and analytic workloads at this time. Instead, it’s unveiling new in-memory
-
COMMON Fights Off The Blues In Austin
April 15, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThere’s no denying that the IBM i server ecosystem is not what it used to be. The number of customers and users is far down from its heyday over a decade ago, when COMMON could attract 3,000 to 4,000 attendees to its conferences twice a year. The good old days are gone, but nobody was singing The Sky is Crying in Austin last week. In fact, COMMON-goers got revved up for the AS/400’s 25th birthday, which meant passionate reflections on the longevity of this amazing platform and, of course, cake.
COMMON kicked off its 2013 Annual Conference and Exposition by
-
BCD Tackles Mobile App Development with WebSmart Mobile
April 9, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBusiness Computer Design Int’l. yesterday unveiled a beta version of WebSmart Mobile, a new component of its WebSmart development environment. The new software, which was announced at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas, uses jQuery Mobile to enable IBM i developers to create Web-based mobile apps that deploy to smartphones and tablets running iOS, Android, Windows 8, and Blackberry platforms.
BCD customers have been creating IBM i-powered mobile apps using WebSmart for some time. After all, BCD added jQuery support in early 2011, which gave customers the capability to generate Web clients that use the latest HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
-
VAULT400 Now Available As IBM i Solution Edition
April 9, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreUnited Computer Group is hoping to give private IBM i clouds a run for their money with the IBM i Solution Edition for VAULT400, which was unveiled yesterday at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas, and combines UCG’s data vaulting software with Power Systems servers. In the near future, UCG plans to unveil a menu of IT services that it says will give IBM i shops many of the advantages of moving to a private cloud, without giving up physical ownership of the box.
UCG’s new IBM i Solution Edition for VAULT400 provides a pre-loaded copy of UCG’s electronic data
-
Education the First Step in TEMBO’s Quest for Database Modernization
April 9, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIt’s been nearly a year since TEMBO Technology Lab launched its flagship database modernization tool, called Adsero Optima Foundation, in the US market. Since then, the product has garnered interest from dozens of American IBM i shops, who are intrigued with the prospect of migrating from old DDS to the SQL engine. While the folks at TEMBO would have preferred a warmer reception–and a quicker sales ramp-up–they understand that there’s a need for greater education on the topic of database modernization.
Make no mistake about it: TEMBO is in the database modernization business to make money. It is true that
-
Why Your i Should Never, Ever Be Left Unattended On the Internet
April 9, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBy all accounts, Rich Loeber is a good and decent man. He doesn’t leave dogs in parked cars on hot days. He pays taxes. There are no reports of stealing candy from babies. He may be a Yankees fan, but we’ll let that slide. However, when Loeber announced last week that he has an IBM i server that he leaves unprotected on the Internet–and then admitted that it’s been there for 18 years–it naturally leads to certain questions.
In 1995, Loeber decided to do an experiment. He would leave an AS/400 out on the open Internet without the benefit of