Manufacturers and distributors that would like to voice-enable their i/OS applications, but have been daunted by the six- or seven-digit price tags and the need to modify application source code, may be interested in the new SyVox emulator announced by Genesta last month. The established provider of voice-enablement solutions says the new product will allow i/OS shops to voice-enable their applications, using techniques similar to screen-scraping, for less than $20,000.

Voice-enablement is one of the hottest technologies in warehousing and manufacturing at the moment. By allowing workers to communicate verbally with WMS and ERP applications–responding to audio directions from the

Infor says its customers are beginning to take advantage of the “Flex” upgrade and migration program that it unveiled seven months ago. Since the start of the program, more than 220 customers have either upgraded their ERP applications to the latest release, or migrated to another ERP application, Infor says. About 60 System i customers–mostly ERP XA (MAPICS) shops–have availed themselves of the program, says a senior VP with the company, who says he’s set his sites on the vast BPCS installed base.

Infor launched its Flex upgrade and migration programs last June as a way to entice customers to

Linoma Software last week announced Crypto Complete version 2.2, a new release of its i/OS encryption utility that now features cross-platform tokenization capabilities. With the new offering, customers can centralize the storage of sensitive data, such as credit card and Social Security numbers, on a secure System i server, while enabling applications running on other i/OS, Windows, Linux, or Unix servers to access that data using tokens and HTTPS.

Linoma unveiled Crypto Complete in 2007 to provide i/OS shops with an easier route to encryption and decryption that bypassed working with IBM APIs, which can be difficult to learn and

Vision Solutions last week debuted its PowerPack for POWER7 Migration, a collection of software for moving IBM i and AIX environments to the new Power7 servers. With the new PowerPack offering, Vision says it can “virtually eliminate” downtime as a result of migration.

Upgrading server platforms can be a major event for many System i shops. Traditionally, moving to a new box requires the administrator to follow a strict protocol: kick everybody off the system, run a full save to tape, mount the tapes to the new system, tell it to restore, and pray profusely.

If everything goes well, it

Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new release of its IntelliChief content management and workflow system, a Windows-based application that is commonly used to store documents from i/OS-based ERP systems and to route them among employees. With version 2.6.1, Quadrant added new features that should help to streamline workflows in certain situations.

While it is generally good to be precise in back office functions, sometimes too much precision can be a bad thing. Quadrant is learning this with IntelliChief, and applying the lessons with the new version 2.6.1 release.

Specifically, IntelliChief now gives users the capability to route documents to

Banks running the i/OS-based Signature core processing system from Fiserv shouldn’t have to worry about the scalability of their chosen platform any time soon following the disclosure of a performance benchmark conducted jointly by Fiserv and IBM at the Rochester, Minnesota, lab.

Fiserv recently hauled a copy of Signature to the snowy confines of IBM’s Rochester lab to see how it faired on POWER 6 generation technology, including a Power Systems Model 570 server running the IBM i 6.1 operating system.

Signature was able to process 10 million accounts in 28 minutes when four processing cores were active on the

Customers of Integrated Custom Software are encouraged to download a new release of FormSprint, the i/OS electronic forms design and management tool. Released in January, FormSprint release 201001 introduces a number of new features pertaining to PDF creation, barcode generation, and printer and fax control.

FormSprint is an i/OS document management offering that handles a range of document-related needs for System i shops, including merging form overlays with spool file data, generating MICR and barcodes, and distribution of documents (through the FormSprint Power E-mail add-on, or via hooks into e-mail and fax software from Computer Keyes, Quadrant Software,

Symtrax last month unveiled StarQuery for Calc, a new module of its StarQuery suite of business intelligence (BI) tools designed to work with Open Office‘s Calc, a free and open source alternative to Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet program.

StarQuery is a collection of BI and reporting tools unveiled by Symtrax in late 2003. The software was designed to enable end users to generate their own reports and do their own data manipulation from the comfort of Excel (once an administrator has created the database views that users will have access to). By putting more power in the hands of decision

Genuitec this month is expected to deliver a new release of MyEclipse, the $150 IDE that the company positions as an alternative to IBM‘s Rational Application Developer IDE for creating enterprise Java applications. With MyEclipse version 8.5, Genuitec is including its Pulse application lifecycle management and collaboration tools directly into the MyEclipse product.

Genuitec has been developing Java IDEs since it was founded in 1997. In 2003, it launched MyEclipse Blue Edition, its most feature-rich (and expensive) IDE that seeks to offer many of the core WebSphere development capabilities found in IBM’s Eclipse-based RAD offerings.

While MyEclipse Blue doesn’t

Still on Pace for Healthy Growth

Despite years of lower-than-anticipated spending on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, ABI Research is once again predicting strong double-digit growth in sales of RFID equipment and software over the next five years.

This week, the market research firm announced that it expects the overall RFID market to grow to $7.46 billion by 2014, representing a 14 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years. If the market for automobile immobilization is factored into the equation, the total amount of spending on RFID is expected to hit $8.25 billion by then.

This