Alex Woodie
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Polaris Chooses IntelliChief for Office Automation
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read morePolaris Industries, the $3.2 billion maker of snowmobiles, has selected IntelliChief‘s eponymous software to help it streamline back-office business processes and eliminate paper. The initial IntelliChief implementation will target accounts payable (AP) processes, and will hook into Polaris’ IBM i-based Infor ERP XA application.
IntelliChief is a Windows-based suite of software designed to help IBM i shops transition to electronic documents, or “paperless process management,” as IntelliChief calls it. In its basic configurations, the software provides a simple repository for storing and accessing e-documents. More advanced implementations involve the roll-out of sophisticated scanning and data capture solutions, direct integration
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OKI Data to Carry Brooks Print Converters
March 5, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOKI Data Americas, the North American subsidiary of the Japanese printing and telecommunications giant, has inked a deal with Brooks Internet Software to carry the software company’s line of print protocol converters for IBM i, Unix, and mainframe servers.
The co-marketing deal announced last month will ensure that organizations buying printers and other gear from OKI Data Americas will also have the opportunity to buy Brooks’ products, notably ExcelliPrint and RPM Remote Print Manager, as part of the deal. RPM Remote Print Manager is a Line Printer Daemon (LPD) print server designed to provide more flexibility in the management
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New ERP Installs Get Mixed Returns, Panorama Says
March 4, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreImplementing an ERP system is a notoriously difficult thing to do. By some estimates, more than 60 percent of ERP implementations are doomed to fail. And yet, companies continue to adopt them, because. . . well, they have to. The ERP watchers at Panorama Consulting recently checked into the state of enterprise software implementations with its annual ERP report, which detected the requisite unhappiness in recent ERP adopters, but also found some satisfied customers, too.
From September to January, Panorama Consulting corralled 172 of its customers onto its website to take a survey about their recent ERP installations. The company
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IBM Dives Head First Into Mobile
February 25, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last week unveiled an expansive new strategy to deliver mobile business solutions under MobileFirst, its new brand of software and services for delivering apps on smartphones and tablets. With MobileFirst, IBM seeks to bring together all of the elements required by an enterprise to successfully roll-out mobile solutions, including development, deployment, device management, and security tools. And, IBM being IBM, it also includes a healthy dose of professional services, but no apparent IBM i hooks at this time.
MobileFirst is an umbrella brand that brings together many pieces of software that already existed in IBM’s portfolio, but it introduces
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PowerHA Installs Exceed 2,000 Globally, IBM Says
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreMore than 2,000 customers around the world are using PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i, says Steve Finnes, IBM‘s worldwide product offering manager for PowerHA on AIX and IBM i. And with new HA capabilities for small and midsize businesses arriving with the IBM i 7.1 TR6 release of the software, the number of customers running PowerHA on smaller systems like the Power 720 is likely to grow.
PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i is one product, but it actually refers to a variety of protection schemes that utilize different data replication mechanisms and are aimed at companies of varying sizes.
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PowerTech Shines a Light on ‘Black Hole’ Commands
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreDespite all the auditing and journaling functions in the IBM i OS, it’s still possible for a user to issue commands without accountability. For example, when users start an interactive SQL session, they are basically invisible to the administrator until the session ends. To help thwart this black hole of liability, PowerTech has added a new feature to Authority Broker that uses screenshots of the 5250 session to all track activity, regardless of the tool they’re using.
PowerTech’s Authority Broker enables security administrators to temporarily grant users and programmers special authorities, such as ALLOBJ and SECADM, so they can perform
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Vision Launches Cloud Initiative for RaaS
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreVision Solutions last week unveiled new software and licensing models that should make it easier for public cloud providers to offer Vision’s disaster recovery and high availability solutions to Power and X86 customers. For Power customers, a key element of Vision’s new cloud strategy is metered billing for MIMIX, which Vision says will streamline licensing and billing in a cloud environment, to provide recovery as a service (RaaS).
Vision is no cloud newbie. In fact, its software has been running for at least a decade in the data centers of managed service providers (MSPs) to provide failover protection for their
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Cilasoft Monitors Additional Exit Points with IBM i Security Tool
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i security software developer Cilasoft last week unveiled enhancements to two of its products, including CONTROLER, its exit point monitoring solution, and EAM, its Elevated Authority Manager solution. Cilasoft says the capability to monitor two additional exit points in CONTROLER–the open database file and socket exit points–as well as new commands in the tool, will give IBM i shops a powerful new way to enforce data-centric security policies, which it claims is “an enormous breakthrough.”
CONTROLER is a network security tool that monitors and controls all inbound and outbound activity going through the various exit points that IBM built
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ARCAD Updates IT Service Management Tool
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreARCAD Software recently announced the release of ARCAD-Customer version 9.5, the latest release of its IT service management and customer request tracking tool.
ARCAD is best known for its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, which provide the capability to track source code changes to applications running on IBM i and other platforms, and ensure they make it into production.
In the ALM cycle, the source code modifications are often initiated through user change requests, and that’s where ARCAD-Customer comes in. The product provides a system for accepting, analyzing, and tracking change requests originating with users of the applications. The software
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Correction: Oracle Does Support Old JDE World on New IBM i
February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn our lead story last week, “End of Tech Support Looms for JD Edwards Shops”, we reported that Oracle‘s JD Edwards World is dependent on i5/OS V5R4. In fact, Oracle has supported those World releases on IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 for at least two years. But most World shops who contacted IT Jungle plan to upgrade their ERP anyway.
Several IT Jungle readers wrote in last week to point out the fact that they do run JD Edwards World A7.3 and A8.1 on newer releases of IBM i, and have done so for some time.