Whitney National Bank, which recently signed a contract to install the Silverlake core banking system from Jack Henry & Associates, is adopting IBM‘s Banking Industry Framework, IBM announced earlier this month. By adopting the framework, Whitney National will get access to decades-worth of IBM experience in the banking sector, which will better prepare the bank to adapt to existing and expected regulation, as well as customers’ evolving expectations.

Whitney National Bank is a publicly traded bank with $12 billion in assets. From its headquarters in New Orleans, Louisiana, it operates more than 160 branches in the five-state Gulf

Keeping data in synch across Windows and System i applications used to be a largely manual chore for First American Bank (FAB), a mid-sized community bank located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. However, after installing RevSoft‘s suite of systems management tools–including job scheduler, file transfer, and message management software–errors have been reduced, and operators can administer on an exception basis.

First American Bank is a privately held bank with more than $2.5 billion in assets. The bank provides a range of personal and community banking services through nearly 50 locations in and around Chicago–a number that will soon increase

A new release of Profound Logic‘s on-the-fly Web enablement tool, called Genie, will make it easier for customers to customize their i/OS applications just to their liking. With Genie 4.0, customers gain access to more than 150 “widgets” that allow them to quickly add screen elements such as images and drop-down boxes to converted applications. Better session handling, DBCS support, and new integration capabilities round out the new release.

Profound introduced Genie almost three years ago to provide i/OS shops with a quick way to Web-enable the 5250 screens of their RPG, COBOL, or CL applications–even i/OS system screens

While the recession has hammered overall IT spending during the last 18 months, some sectors of the industry are doing quite well. Rocket Software and its Seagull Software subsidiary, for instance, say they are experiencing a surge in demand for integration and modernization tools, as System i and mainframe users seek to eek more life out of their “legacy” applications as a result of the recession. Seagull hopes a new release of its LegaSuite Integration software unveiled last week will help it to capitalize on the trend.

People and businesses around the world are still recovering from the historic crash

Eighteen months after the launch of its third-party maintenance business for JD Edwards, Spinnaker Support last week announced the formation of a new consulting division that’s dedicated to serving the custom development needs of its JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne clients.

Spinnaker quietly entered the third-party maintenance business for JD Edwards in August 2008 as an extension of its supply chain consulting and outsourcing business, which had been around for most of the decade. While the Denver, Colorado, company did consulting work in the area of supply chain planning and execution, it did not perform general-purpose development work on behalf

MVP Systems Software recently launched a new release of is Job Access Management System (JAMS), a Windows-based job scheduler that dispatches agents to i/OS and other host servers. An improved GUI management console and trigger-related enhancements are among the new features in JAMS 4.9.

Written in .NET, JAMS is heavily focused on helping to automate production Windows environments, where the majority of its 700-plus customers run. However, the software also includes agents that allow JAMS to control and coordinate jobs executing on i/OS, Unix, Linux, and OpenVMS servers.

MVP focused on making the GUI console easier to use with JAMS

SunGard Availability Services last week announced a partnership with EMC to use EMC’s market-leading data de-duplication technology from its Data Domain subsidiary to power SunGard’s Secure2Disk disaster recovery (DR) appliances.

SunGard introduced the Secure2Disk appliances last June as a way for its larger customers to protect their data. By storing backups locally on the Secure2Disk appliance, customers are guaranteed rapid access to low-priority recoveries. At the same time, by replicating backups to a second Secure2Disk appliance located offsite or at a SunGard recovery center, the solution offers good DR protection.

When SunGard launched the appliances last year, the company used

Stonebranch this month unveiled new releases of Infitran and Indesca, its respective managed file transfer (MFT) and suite of job scheduling agents for i/OS, z/OS, Unix, and Windows platforms. With the new version 4.1 releases of the products, Stonebranch has bolstered its capability for automating SAP environments, among other enhancements.

Stonebranch is a 10-year-old company that develops workload automation software from its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The company’s two flagship products, Indesca and Infitran, are aimed at the complementary demands of coordinating batch jobs and transferring files across customers’ diverse computing environments.

With this month’s launch of Indesca 4.1 and

System i shops that adopt QlikTech‘s Windows-based business intelligence software now have a new way to consume information, dashboards, and reports from their i/OS ERP systems: via mobile phones running Google‘s mobile phone operating system, Android.

QlikTech has enjoyed tremendous success the last few years with QlikView, its suite of BI software that’s built on an in-memory associative database that provides very fast access to data, including multi-dimensional “cubes.” While bigger BI software vendors struggle to shake the notion that BI implementations must take years and cost millions of dollars, QlikTech has grabbed market share and industry awards

Cast Iron Systems last week unveiled a new integration offering aimed at simplifying integration projects involving applications residing in public or private computing “clouds” and on-premise servers. Called OmniConnect, the new offering is, itself, a cloud offering delivered via the software as a service (SaaS) model, a change from Cast Iron’s earlier appliance-based integration approach.

Cast Iron says its new OmniConnect offering handles all aspects of application integration, including data migration and process integration. The offering, which is targeted at large corporations and SaaS vendors, includes ETL-like capabilities for extracting, cleansing, and synchronizing data between on-premise “legacy” systems and newer