Dan Burger
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Wholesalers Making Adjustments During Economic Storm
November 10, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreTo find out what companies in the wholesale and distribution business are doing to succeed in these turbulent economic times, I set up an appointment with IBM‘s wholesale industry segment executive, Roberto Sanchez, who works not only with customers, but also with independent software vendors and resellers in the sales channel. Sanchez understands the System i because many companies rely on it in this market and also because he was once a systems engineer for the AS/400.
Like most executives at IBM, Sanchez would rather not talk about platform specifics. His point of view is solution specific instead. Customers
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Tight Credit Squeezes IT Equipment Leases
November 10, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreIT equipment leasing, a favorite method used by hardware suppliers that garner revenue from places they never could crack otherwise, is feeling the woozy effects of the stormy economic seas. It’s not just IT equipment leases that are taking on water. All types of equipment leasing are in the same boat. The name on that boat is the S.S. Default. It’s much too early, however, to say the boat is sinking.
When the living is good and the credit is easy, there seems to be no brakes on who can finance equipment or how they can pay it off. Just
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The i Gives Manufacturers and Distributors Cost Control
November 3, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreYou make and distribute products. That’s your business–one, the other, or both. But the pressure is on to squeeze more efficiency out of operations and drive more profits to the bottom line. You may have your choice of dragons to slay, but the decision to improve transportation planning, shipment execution, financial settlement, and tracking visibility are popular choices. Not coincidentally, this is one of those IBM System i strongholds.
Transportation management is closely tied to demand management, increased service levels, and more frequent inventory turns. But from the IT perspective, it is mostly about integration. Integration with enterprise resource management
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SOA Without the Middleware, Without the Pressure
October 27, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreInfor, with its “Open SOA” initiative just beginning to spew out products for its massive ERP software installed base, is aiming for that customer dream of actually reducing IT complexity while increasing interoperability and reducing costs. Can it make that dream come true or does that only occur in the marketing department’s dream world? With more than 18,000 ERP software customers running on the IBM System i, and another 50,000 or so running ERP on other platforms, there are a lot of eyes on Infor.
The Infor view of SOA is interesting because of its open approach, which avoids
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Infor ERP LX Adds Compliance and Language Features, SOA Enablement
October 21, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreManufacturers using the Infor ERP LX suite of products for process or mixed-mode environments have new features and functions available to them with the release last week of Feature Pack 3. At the top of the list are capabilities relating to regulatory compliance and support for multiple languages in a single instance database. The LX product line was once known as BPCS and is often referred to by that name. It’s a bastion of the IBM System i installed base.
Among the core business processes that are included in the Infor LX suite are manufacturing, logistics, channel management, customer relationships,
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Infor CEO Preaches Business Darwinism, Prepares for Hyper Business Future
October 20, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreTaking a page from Eric Marks’ book, Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, Infor chairman and chief executive officer, Jim Schaper, gave the attendees at his company’s Inforum user conference last week his preview of business in the year 2015. Infor, the ERP super group that has assembled a collection of major and midrange ERP software firms that specialize in the manufacturing and distribution businesses, is in the early stages of shifting its application development to a service oriented architecture.
The move to what Infor calls its “Open SOA,” a technology framework with middleware built in, has the aim of
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SMB Manufacturers Testing PLM Integration Possibilities
October 13, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreBreaking down boundaries is maybe the most worthwhile goal an IT department can under take. The IT industry that helped build all the walls–we like to call them silos these days–is helping to eliminate those obstacles, and this is to the credit of those companies that are wholeheartedly participating. Also deserving of some credit are the companies that have gotten past platform bigotry to pursue business interests. They all deserve a pat on the back, if you can find any of them.
OK, that may be an undeserved slight. In actuality, there are many examples of increased efforts toward interoperability,
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IBM and Vision Solutions Align HA Distribution Resources
October 6, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreHigh availability technologies come in a variety of flavors, including software with logical replication, hardware-based replication, cross-site mirroring, and switched disk. The options are not exclusive. Companies often deploy a combination of technologies that tie high availability, disaster recovery, and storage. Part or all of this, depending on the company strategy, fits into the category of clustering, and that leads to an announcement last week from Vision Solutions that it has a new distribution agreement with IBM for the i environment.
The focal point of this arrangement is Vision’s Cluster1 and IBM’s PowerHA for i.
IBM PowerHA for i was
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Net Loss Clouds Lawson’s Q1 Report
October 6, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreEnterprise resource planning software is as comfortable on IBM midrange computers as a cowboy is in the saddle. It’s been that way since the debut of the AS/400 and even earlier with the System/38 and System/36 boxes. But last week, when Lawson Software released its first quarter 2009 financial report, the lack of System i-based business was one of the reasons the bean pot was not as full as expected.
In releasing its Q1 2009 report October 2, Lawson was pleased to report revenues were up slightly thanks in large part to maintenance renewals, customer migrations to Lawson Total Care
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New ASNA President Takes On Modernization Business with Services Emphasis
September 29, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen BluePhoenix Solutions acquired ASNA 13 months ago, it made building the services side of the business a priority. Pieces of that puzzle have been added since the merger, and the latest move has been to put a new president in place. Last week, ASNA announced Greg Schottland would be taking command of the .NET-oriented application modernization software company that has refocused its approach to helping customers with modernization projects.
Modernization projects are under way in a fair number of IBM i shops, but the traction that many people predicted in the application modernization area has not taken hold. Schottland