Of the roughly 8,000 people Infor employs, Jack Bullock may be the happiest. “I think it’s the best job in the company. I truly believe that,” the new general manager and vice president of Infor’s System i division told IT Jungle last week. Since taking the job about eight months ago, Bullock has received a crash course in IBM i technology, and today he is confident that Infor can expand on its unique position in the midrange marketplace.

In March, Bullock was promoted from his job as vice president of North American sales and services to take the System i

LaserVault last week unveiled an all-in-one backup appliance that gives IBM i shops the versatility of a virtual tape library (VTL), but without the complexity and overhead. The new Universal Backup Device, or UBD, appears to the IBM i server as a Fibre Channel-connected tape drive, but in reality, it’s a Windows-based appliance that holds up to 6 TB of IBM i data on RAID-protected disk.

Through its various parent companies and subsidiaries (including Electronic Storage Corp.), LaserVault has been in the IBM i storage business since 1990. The Tulsa, Oklahoma, company still butters its bread with the core LaserVault

IBM has merged all of its Rational Team Concert products, including individual packages for IBM i and z/OS environments, into a single package with Rational Team Concert 3.0, which becomes generally available next week. The new version of Team Concert also features improvements in the core areas of lifecycle management, changes to the licensing schemes, a new green-screen interface, and integration to Rational DOORS.

Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a collaborative lifecycle management tool designed to allow teams of developers to work together efficiently, without stepping on each other’s toes. Among the software’s functions are: source code tracking for RPG,

Talend, a developer of open source data management and ETL tools that support IBM i and most other platforms, last week announced the acquisition of Sopera, a German developer of open source application integration. The acquisition–paid through $34 million in new venture capital led by the renowned Silver Lake firm–indicates an aggressive new push on the part of Talend to build out a comprehensive suite of commercial open source middleware.

Soperas develops the Advanced Services Factory (ASF) suite, a collection of integration tools, including an enterprise service bus (ESB), Eclipse-based editors for designing and linking processes, and

Quadrant Software says the latest release of its content management and workflow routing application, IntelliChief version 3.1, will bring usability enhancements to users and administrators alike.

IntelliChief is a suite of Windows-based content management software designed to help organizations adopt paper-free processes for common business tasks. In addition to serving as a storage repository for documents that may have originated as spool files on an IBM i server, IntelliChief also offers features such as automated workflow, direct integration with ERP systems, document scanning, and data capture capabilities.

Quadrant has streamlined several existing features with IntelliChief version 3.1. The electronic document

The passage of Hurricane Ike through Texas in 2008 convinced the folks at Jake’s Finer Foods that they needed a high availability (HA) solution to protect their critical IBM i-based systems. While there have thankfully been no hurricanes as big as Ike since then, the company is happy with the investment it made in HA software from Maxava (formerly Maximum Availability).

For those who lived in coastal Texas, Hurricane Ike still elicits bitter memories. The storm came ashore at Galveston, Texas, on September 13, 2008, as a Category 2 hurricane, but with a storm surge of a larger cyclone. After

International Business Systems, the embattled ERP software company based in Sweden, last week unveiled a new release of IBS Integrator, a multi-faceted integration tool used by many of its customers. The company says the new version 6.7 release will bring enhancements in the areas of scalability, performance, security, and administration. The company also unveiled the results of its recent meeting regarding the resignation of two board members.

IBS touts Integrator as a powerful tool for integrating applications and data, regardless of platform. Considering that most IBS customers are running their IBS software on the IBM Power Systems-IBM i platform,

Disk is a different creature on the IBM i platform than it is with other platforms. For starters, it’s not called disk. It’s called direct access storage device, or DASD. That bizarre name should be the first clue that failure to adhere to best practices can be a very expensive proposition. Luckily, IBM i systems management vendor CCSS recently published a handy guide called “Disk Danger Zones” that identifies the five most expensive DASD-related mistakes you shouldn’t make with your IBM i server.

The nature of DASD on the IBM i platform requires administrators to pay close attention to all

Attunity last week unveiled a new release of its CDC Suite for SSIS, a version of its change data capture (CDC) technology that closely integrates with Microsoft‘s SQL Server Integration Services product. The new release brings data in from outside sources much more quickly than previous releases, the vendor says.

CDC Suite for SSIS is a special version of Attunity’s CDC software that’s designed to be used for SQL Server-based business intelligence implementations. The CDC Suite uses log-based CDC connectors that Attunity has developed for many platforms, including DB2/400, DB2 for LUW (Linux, Unix, and Windows), the Oracle database,

iTech Solutions Group will resell the CODA Financials package from UNIT4 CODA as part of a new business agreement, the two companies announced yesterday.

CODA Financials is a collection of accounting software that has been in use for more than 30 years. The software, which today is developed in Java, offers deeper and more sophisticated accounting functionality than the financial modules commonly found in ERP suites, according to UNIT4 CODA executives. The Manchester, New Hampshire, company attributes about 30 percent of its revenue from sales to IBM i customers, and touts its capability to run natively on the platform as