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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.

  • Lavastorm Rains on Fraudster Parades

    December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Fraud is big business. It’s tough to pin an exact number on the size of fraud. By one account, fraud commonly accounts for five percent of a company’s annual revenues, or an average of $160,000. Whatever the numbers might be, here’s one thing that’s certain: There is a growing need for companies to protect themselves through the use of fraud management systems (FMS), such as the new Lavastorm Fraud Manager recently released by the smart folks at Lavastorm Analytics.

    Detecting fraud has been one of the many things you could do with the Lavastorm Analytics Platform, which is sort

    …

    Read more
  • Magic Teams Up with Samsung in Smartphone Pact

    December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Magic Software last week announced it has hooked up with Samsung, the biggest maker of Android smartphones and tablets, in a bid to gain a share of the booming market for enterprise mobility solutions.

    Samsung’s Enterprise Alliance Program provides a way for software vendors and integrators to get assistance from Samsung in developing and bringing to market applications for the South Korean company’s successful Galaxy line of Android phones and tablets. There are four levels of membership in the program, including bronze, silver, gold, and platinum levels. Silver partners, such as Magic, gain an advantage in building “differentiated user

    …

    Read more
  • NCR to Buy Retalix for $650 Million

    December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

    NCR has inked a deal with the board of Retalix to buy the retail ERP software maker for $30 per share, or $650 million, the companies announced last week.

    Retalix develops software that retail chains use to manage their business. The company’s lineup consists of merchandising, point of sale, supply chain, logistics, and marketing components. Many of the company’s offerings are Windows based, including its flagship Retalix 10 in-store management system. However, its Power Enterprise line, which is a distribution-focused ERP solution, runs on the IBM i platform. Some of its offerings are developed in Java.

    Retalix says its software

    …

    Read more
  • Midsize Manufacturers Crave Mobile ERP, Survey Says

    December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Midsize manufacturers, one of the sweet spots for IBM i ERP, have a hearty appetite for mobile interfaces into their ERP systems, according to a new survey commissioned by South African ERP software developer SYSPRO.

    The survey, which focused on midsize manufacturers and distributors in the US with revenues between $20 million and $300 million, aimed to illuminate what decision makers in those companies thought of several questions, including whether they would like to have mobile interfaces to ERP systems, whether they’d like to have point of sale (POS) functionality embedded into ERP systems, and whether they would prefer

    …

    Read more
  • Trinium Keeps on Trucking with Mobile Interface from mrc

    December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Chalk up another win for mrc, the developer of Web application development tools for IBM i and other platforms. Last week, the Chicago, Illinois, company announced the roll-out of a new mobile interface that it helped build for trucking software provider Trinium Technologies.

    Trinium-MC2 is a Web app that lets truck drivers communicate with their Trinium dispatch system directly from any smartphone or tablet. Dispatch instructions can be sent, received, acknowledged, and completed by drivers on their smartphones or tablets, the vendors say.

    Trinium says it already has more than 1,000 users of M2C, which mrc and Trinium

    …

    Read more
  • Sandy Shows State Of IT Resilience Has Room For Improvement

    December 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Superstorm Sandy rearranged parts of the Eastern Seaboard a month and a half ago, but she is still remaking the business landscape. Some companies were ruined by Sandy, while some industries in the area, such as construction and car sales, are now flourishing. The National Hurricane Center changed how it categorizes storms as a result of Sandy, which is the model for a new type of storm powered by global warming. Sandy also poked holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of many IT organizations, and highlighted where improvement can be made.

    Some would say that it was inevitable that

    …

    Read more
  • IBM i Support Through 2025? Hold On Just a Second

    December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Steve Will, IBM‘s chief architect for the IBM i platform, raised a few eyebrows during his presentation to close the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, last Friday. After Will put up a slide that showed a future release of the IBM i OS being supported through the end of 2025, several audience members posted Twitter messages about it. However, in his blog yesterday, Will said to not take the slide at face value.

    While it’s abundantly used in the IBM i marketplace, Twitter hasn’t been an especially fruitful avenue for dispensing actual news that affects

    …

    Read more
  • IBM Ships a Fix for Bugs in RDP 8.5

    December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

    IBM last week issued a fixpack for Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP) that addresses some of the shortcomings that developers have complained about with RDP version 8.5, a major new release of the IDE that was released earlier this year. In particular, Fixpack 1, or RDP version 8.5.1.

    If the complaints that RDP users posted to the Midrange.com mailing list are any indication, RDP 8.5 was an exceptionally buggy release. Users posting to WDSCI-L (the product was formerly the WebSphere Developer Studio Client) complained about a number of problems with the integrated development environment (IDE).

    One of the most

    …

    Read more
  • InterForm Launches Embedded PDF

    December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

    The big “turducken” craze has passed, to the great relief of responsible foodies and heart surgeons everywhere. But the business IT equivalent of turducken–stuffing business documents inside of other business documents–is just taking off. IBM i document management software vendor InterForm is one of the first companies to take advantage of the new capability in the PDF standard that enables users to literally stuff other documents–including Word docs, TIFFS, XLS spreadsheets, or other PDFs–right into a PDF.

    InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen says the new Embedded PDF software will be a big timesaver for accounting departments that are constantly fetching old

    …

    Read more
  • Kronos Launches HR App for iPad

    December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

    Kronos last month rolled out a new app that allow users of its iSeries Central suite to access their human resources software from an iPad. The new app, called Workforce Tablet, provides access to command HR management tasks, such as approving timecards or shifting worker schedules around, and also includes basic analytic functionality. The $870 million company also made several other announcements at its annual KronosWorks conference.

    Workforce Tablet is a native iOS app designed to provide managers and employees with access to Kronos’ server-based HR and human capital management (HCM) suites, including iSeries Central and Workforce Central, from an

    …

    Read more

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