Today, as expected, the AS/400, iSeries, and System i customer base is finally getting some machinery that is better suited to their needs and budgets than the larger Power7 rack and tower systems that IBM announced in February. And, given how relatively few OS/400 and IBM i shops deploy blade servers, the new Power 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines that debut today are also going to be a better fit than the new BladeCenter PS700, PS701, and PS702 blades that came out in April.

As I have explained in past issues of The Four Hundred newsletter, IBM had not

The big, bad box of the Power7 lineup rolls out onto the floor today, and it just might sag a little bit. The Power 795, as the top-of-the-line Power Systems server is called, crams up to 256 cores and 1,024 threads into a single system image backed by 8 TB of shared memory in which applications can frolic. The Power 795 has four times cores and roughly five times the raw processing capacity as the top-end Power 595 machine that dates from the summer of 2008 and that was looking a bit long in the tooth.

Like its Power 595

System i pros who are looking to leverage their RPG skills to modernize their 5250 apps, but are frustrated with the slowness of Web-based applications may want to consider SilverDev, a integrated development environment (IDE) and application framework from the French company Experia. The vendor says SilverDev delivers all the benefits of a pure Windows client and an event-driven paradigm, and none of the slowness and frustration that often accompanies Web-based modernization efforts on the IBM i platform.

Experia, which attended the 2010 COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, created SilverDev in 2003 after the company experimented with several Web

Tracking down potentially fraudulent changes made to System i applications will be easier for users of Raz-Lee Security‘s AP-Journal tool now that the security software company has added a GUI to its journal management product for IBM‘s IBM i operating system. Raz-Lee says the new Eclipse-based GUI for the AP-Journal product is more intuitive to use than the old 5250 display.

Raz-Lee’s AP-Journal augments the powerful journaling capabilities of the IBM i operating system to create a searchable record of all the changes made to applications, data, and system settings. The software doesn’t guarantee that users with

Administrators can now use their smart phones to respond to System i messages when they’re using RevSoft‘s message management and monitoring tool. The new feature added to Rev Message version 10.2 will be useful for tasks such as restarting failed jobs, which would typically require an administrator or operator to log onto the server from an emulator.

Rev Message is one of an integrated set of systems management tools that include Rev Scheduler, Rev Dataflow, and Rev Guardian. The product, which saves administrators time by automatically scanning message logs and queues for important events, works equally well with System

Development tool maker mrc made two announcements recently that should make its m-Power customers more productive. For starters, the Chicago company, which targets the System i platform with its Java-based development tools, launched the Project Exchange, a website where m-Power users can share their creations and download software developed by others. The IBM business partner also introduced a new AJAX screen designer that simplifies Web interface development.

m-Power is a model-based development tool that generates J2EE-based applications, like Web portals, e-commerce sites, executive dashboards, mobile phone apps, and business intelligence systems. The software, which has roots in mrc’s old 4GL

Vermont Information Processing (VIP), a developer of ERP software for the beverage distribution industry, has achieved higher levels of software quality as the result of its use of Original Software‘s quality assurance (QA) and testing software for IBM‘s IBM i platform, the vendor announcement recently.

VIP develops and supports IBM i-based ERP software for approximately 400 companies in the U.S. beverage distribution industry. The company, which is based in Colchester, Vermont, has been supporting the IBM midrange server with its software for decades, and has a good track record to show for it. However, the recent wave of

Bank executives that rely on Jack Henry & Associates to execute and mange their clients’ electronic funds transfers (EFTs) and payment processing via ACH and Check21 will be glad to hear that Jack Henry has licensed software from INETCO Systems Limited to keep a watchful eye on transfers and payment processing.

Jack Henry announced earlier this month that it will use INETCO Insight to oversee the EFT and payment processing activities of two of its divisions, including its jhaPassPort EFT Solutions Group and JHA Payment Processing Solutions. These are just two of the more than 100 complementary solutions that Jack

While the vast majority of SugarCRM‘s customers don’t spend a dime with the company, the demand for professional services and enterprise-level functionality was enough to drive a 50 percent increase in billings during the second quarter, the CRM software maker reported recently. What’s more, the company reported that it signed more than 500 new paying customers during the quarter, mostly the result of its growing sales channel.

Few open source software developers ever succeed in “monetizing” their work. For every MySQL, JBoss, or Red Hat success story, there are a dozen software companies that dabbled with the

Security products vendor BrickHouse Security issued a warning last week over the malware that foreign computer hackers have placed in critical American industrial components using the Internet. The good news is that the security infiltration has to do with electrical power systems, not the IBM Power Systems servers that run a good chunk of midsize American businesses. The bad news is that bad guys may now have the ability to take everything off line, including your Power Systems servers and the Internet connections that feed them.

The Wall Street Journal sparked concern across the country with an April report about