Alex Woodie
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Canadian Office Supply Company Taps VAI for ERP
March 12, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreMonk Office Group, the biggest office supply company in British Columbia, has adopted the latest release of VAI‘s IBM i-based ERP system, called S2K, the software company announced recently.
Over the last 50 years, Monk Office has expanded to become a veritable office giant on the West Coast of Canada, particularly on Vancouver Island, where Monk sells everything from commercial stationary to office furniture out of a network of 10 retail stores stocked from three distribution centers.
The company first adopted S2K in 2005, and today, the company uses several S2K components to streamline various business functions, including ecommerce,
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If COBOL Is Too ‘Un-Cool’ For School, What’s That Make RPG?
March 11, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreA recent survey by COBOL tool provider Micro Focus found a decided lack of enthusiasm for COBOL at colleges and universities, with a large percentage of students viewing COBOL as un-cool, and even dead. COBOL’s little brother, RPG, faces a similar fate, as young IT students favor modern languages, like Java and C++, over what they think of as ridiculously boring business technologies used to run ancient IBM machines.
Just because they think that doesn’t make it right. But unless IBM i leaders get real about the COBOL and RPG skills shortage, it could mean more businesses will migrate off
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BCD Waves its Modernization Wand with Presto 4.5
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCreating custom Web interfaces from existing 5250 screens should be a little bit easier when using the latest release of Business Computer Design Int’l. Presto. With version 4.5, Web 2.0 elements such as drop down boxes can be added quickly through a drag-and-drop motion in its GUI editor. Other enhancements to the product include faster response times, support for charts in iOS devices, and better subfile rendering.
Presto is an on-the-fly GUI generator for green-screen interfaces that debuted in 2008. The software works by intercepting the 5250 data streams associated with IBM i application and system screens, generating HTML versions
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McAfee Works with Raz-Lee to Monitor DB2 for i
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe IBM i pros at Raz-Lee Security are working with counterparts at security giant McAfee to integrate portions of Raz-Lee’s iSecurity suite with McAfee’s enterprise security solutions–specifically, its Database Activity Monitor (DAM) solution. The work will extend DAM to include DB2 for IBM i monitoring capabilities that are not currently offered by McAfee.
McAfee offers a range of database-related solutions for enterprise customers running relational database management systems, such as DB2 for LUW, Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL. This includes Vulnerability Manager, which scans databases for more than 45,000 known threats; Virtual Patching, which detects and prevents intrusions at the
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Bytware Becomes More Friendly to LPM with Messenger Product
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreBytware has introduced a new version of its Messenger suite of systems management tools that is more compatible with Live Partition Mobility (LPM), the new virtualization technology that IBM introduced last year. With Messenger 8, Bytware has introduced a new licensing scheme that is better able to track where the software is actually running, and therefore whether the customer has exceeded his license allotment.
LPM is an important new piece of virtualization technology that IBM debuted last spring with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) 4. The PowerVM feature allows organizations to move IBM i logical partitions (LPARs) around without
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Townsend Adopts KMIP for License Key Interoperability
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreTownsend Security is close to shipping a new version of Alliance Key Manager that includes support for Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP), a new standard designed to provide a single method for accessing and managing encryption keys. KMIP support is important for building uniformity into encryption routines. But its usefulness in IBM i environments is limited at this point.
KMIP was first thought up several years ago by a group of security software vendors to provide a standard interface for connecting the encryption key management and generation programs with the encryption routines that consume encryption keys in critical business systems.
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Spinnaker Nabs Former Rimini Executive
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn the third-party maintenance business, we’re accustomed to hearing about Oracle and SAP losing maintenance and support business to the third-party providers. Today, Spinnaker Support is expected to announce that it has hired a key executive away from its primary competitor, Rimini Street.
Nigel Pullan is an ERP industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience with various companies, including 10 years at JD Edwards, where he was senior vice president and general manager for its EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) operations. Pullan was also at TomorrowNow, the now-defunct pioneer in third-party maintenance services founded by Seth
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ARCTOOLS Gains JD Edwards Validations
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreJD Edwards shops upgrading to World A9.3 or EnterpriseOne versions 9.0 and 9.1 can feel good about purging unwanted data from their systems using DCSoftware‘s ARCTOOLS utility now that Oracle has validated the product on those particular ERP systems.
ARCTOOLS helps automate the process of identifying old data in production databases, and moving it into a long term archive. The software works with DB2 for i, SQL Server, and Oracle databases, and allows users to schedule when purge jobs should run, and allows users to “throttle” them back to avoid impacting production systems. DCSoftware counts more than 300 JD
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Lieberman Goes Super Secret with Privileged Passwords
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn old war movies, you’ve probably seen how, before launching a nuclear missile, the captain and his first lieutenant must turn their keys simultaneously for the launch to work. This is actually a security practice instituted by the United States Air Force and other military organizations that’s called the “two man rule.” Last week, security software vendor Lieberman Software launched a version of the two man rule to control the passwords for privileged user profiles.
Lieberman’s flagship product, called Enterprise Random Password Manager (EPRM), is a security utility designed to discover, secure, track, and audit the use of privileged user
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Private Clouds Growing at a 50 Percent Clip, IDC Says
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWorldwide spending on private cloud services will grow at a 50 percent compound annual growth rate through 2016, at which point it will account for $24 billion in spending, according to the latest forecast from the cloud watchers at IDC. The market for IBM i cloud services is growing, too.
IDC splits the hosted private cloud (HPC) services market into two components. There’s the dedicated private cloud, which offers a dedicated, one-to-one physical compute and storage resources, and the virtual private cloud model, which utilizes shared virtualized resources, and which is an adjunct of the public cloud services model.