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.
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EVault Hooks Up with Fujitsu for DR Clouds
January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie
EVault and Fujitsu are teaming up in a strategic partnership that will see Fujitsu launch a series of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions based on EVault’s technology.
EVault is a major provider of online backup and cloud-based DR solutions. More than 38,000 organizations use EVault’s technology, either as direct customers of EVault or as customers of EVault’s partners. The company, which is a subsidiary of publicly traded disk giant Seagate Technology, doesn’t break out a specific revenue figure, but it figures to be a pretty healthy slice of Seagate’s software and services business.
Now you can count
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Quantum Unleashes LTO 6 Tape Drives
January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie
Storage giant Quantum is now shipping LTO 6 gear, including drives, cartridges, autoloaders, and libraries. The company says it will support the latest super tape drive format with its storage virtualization software for big data, called StorNext, in early 2013.
Quantum announced the availability of its LTO 6 lineup in late November. At the heart of Quantum’s LTO 6 offering is a SAS-connected half-height drive. Quantum sells four general editions of this drive, including versions that can be installed in a tape library or autoloader; a rack; used on a standalone basis; or installed with a PCI Express host bus
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Pinnacle Business Systems Buys Minneapolis IT Firm
January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie
Pinnacle Business Systems, the IBM i software developer and IT service provider based in Edmond, Oklahoma, last week announced the acquisition of St. Croix Solutions, an IT service provider based near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Pinnacle Business Systems (PBS) is renown in the IBM i world for employing the original developers of BRMS, the backup and recovery product that’s part of the IBM i OS. Today, PBS sells three IBM i solutions, including icom/400 for System i, a message monitoring and alerting tool; trac/400 for System i, a backup and recovery and media management tool; and ups/400 for System i,
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Infinite to Migrate IBM i Apps for Department of the Interior
January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie
Infinite Software announced last month that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to migrate RPG applications off the IBM i platform.
Laguna Niguel, California-based Infinite Software will migrate several of DOI’s RPG applications to the AIX operating system and the Oracle database, according to Raquela Kaplan, marketing director for Infinite.
“The key issue here is to migrate to a more open IBM platform,” Kaplan stated in a press release. “The client wanted the ability to write future data to Oracle in a seamless manner. The Infinite i solution is a perfect fit.”
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2012: An IBM i Year To Remember
January 7, 2013 Alex Woodie
Welcome to 2013. Before we get too far into the year that will be, let’s take a look back at the year that was. 2012 was an eventful year for the IBM i ecosystem, and brought IT Jungle several big stories to report, including major IBM product launches, mega disasters, a raft of new public IBM i clouds, an untold number of tools for mobile and big data, and enough acquisitions and lawsuits to keep lawyers out of trouble–for about 12 months anyway.
Acquisitions —
In January, Rocket Software announced that it bought the iCluster HA software from IBM, and
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ARCAD Goes Unicode with ALM, Looks to Asia for Growth
December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
ARCAD Software has achieved Unicode compliance with version 9 of its application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, thereby enabling the French company to address new markets for its IBM i software, particularly China and Japan. ARCAD says the new version is a major milestone for the product, and provides a foundation on which to build new capabilities in the future.
Achieving Unicode compliance with ARCAD’s entire suite is a major milestone for the company, ARCAD CEO Philippe Magne tells IT Jungle. The effort took two years, and required changing 75 percent of the code that underlies the IBM i change
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Respect My Authority Swapper, Halcyon Says
December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
Halcyon Software has added new features to its Authority Swapper product that will garner the respect of users in IBM i shops everywhere. Now, when an IBM i user swaps into a powerful user profile to accomplish a task, every screen in the session is diligently recorded by the product, providing an un-contestable trail of the user’s activity while they had the elevated authority.
Halcyon unveiled the Authority Swapper two years ago to address concerns about users with elevated authority and the potential abuses that could stem from those powers.
Instead of permanently granting users such special authorities as ALLOBJ
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SystemObjects Lets You Generate iPad Apps from IBM i
December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
Here’s a prediction that’s easy to make: The surge of interest in smart phones and tablets that we saw in 2012 will continue into 2013 and beyond. With demand for mobile computing firmly in place, the rush is on for IBM i software vendors to create mobile interface development tools for IBM i. One IBM i software vendor that wants a piece of the mobile action is the French company SystemObjects, which recently launched a new mobile application development tool called SmartPad4i.
SystemObjects built its reputation with an AS/400 version of the Delphi RAD tool called Delphi/400, and has
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IBM Flexes Its Power Systems Muscle with Wins at Overseas Banks
December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
The IBM i platform has long been a favorite among midsize American banks and credit unions. But increasingly, IBM is doing a brisk business selling Power Systems servers to banks overseas. Since August, IBM has announced deals in India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Ghana. Not all of these deals are IBM i deals, but Bank Ekonomi Raharja (BER) in Indonesia certainly is.
BER is a longtime AS/400 customer that sought to modernize its banking platform following its acquisition by UK banking giant HSBC in 2009. The bank acquired two Power Systems servers, including a Model 770 and a Model
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Software License Audits and Penalties Are Up: True That
December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie
If you’ve been asked to “true up” with your software vendor for exceeding your application license allotment following an audit, you’re not alone. According to a recent IDC report commissioned by Flexera Software, software vendors are getting more aggressive and seeking more compensation from customers who use more software than they pay for.
According to IDC’s report, titled “2012 Key Trends in Software Pricing and Licensing Survey,” more of what organizations spend on applications is coming in the form of “true up” penalties that they must pay to software vendors following an audit. How much more? By one account,