Sometimes breaking up is not all that hard to do. When ASNA and BluePhoenix tied the knot in August 2007, no one would have bet that in less than three and a half years later the two companies would go their separate ways. ASNA, for 28 years a vendor in the IBM midrange, announced last week it was leaving BluePhoenix, a company focused on the mainframe business. Anne Ferguson, president of ASNA, called the move “a management buyout.”

The “new” ASNA emerges from the BluePhoenix years somewhat changed from the San Antonio, Texas-based company that was looking to build the

Citing “very low demand,” MySQL announced last month that it will no longer provide the MySQL database running on the IBM i operating system. The company, which is owned by IBM archrival Oracle, says it will continue to provide source code and limited product support to customers who want to work with the database on IBM i. Representatives with IBM Rochester say they are looking into ways to continue supporting the open source database, possibly with Zend Technology.

On December 7, MySQL announced the end of life (EOL) of MySQL binaries it developed for several operating systems, including

The new year is upon us, and what 2011 may bring to the IBM i software market is on people’s minds. While the IT industry is always in a state of transition, this year promises to be especially disruptive. With a dwindling customer base, some IBM i vendors will go belly up, while others will make moves to shore up their businesses with innovative new products and acquisitions. Here’s the beginning of a list of influential IBM i software vendors that should be interesting to watch as the new year unfolds.

Infor

Is 2011 the year Infor goes public? The

Oracle says the hubbub over its withdrawal of the so-called Blue Stack group of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is overblown, and that it will have little impact on customers who wish to run the ERP system using IBM software and platforms. The company, which reacted to an article in the last issue of Four Hundred Stuff, says nothing will prevent users from running EnterpriseOne on the IBM i platform.

To recap: In September, Oracle quietly issued an announcement to its JD Edwards business partners regarding the Blue Stack (officially the EnterpriseOne Technology Foundation), which is a collection of IBM middleware,

Linoma Software recently shipped Surveyor/400, a Windows-based tool used for accessing and working with files on an IBM i server. With version 3.8, Linoma has added several new features, including a new screen for browsing IFS files, enhancements to wizards that are used for importing and exporting data, and better Excel integration, among others.

Surveyor/400 is a multi-talented tool that’s used for all sorts of data-, file-, and record-related tasks involving IBM i servers, including searching for, accessing, editing, and printing all types of data, including database records, spool files, and IFS entries. It can also be used to make

After six years with ProData, Schadd Gray has split from the IBM i tools vendor to restart his previous company, Damon Technologies, where he will develop and sell RPG Server Pages (RSP).

Gray teamed up with Omaha, Nebraska-based ProData in 2004 in large part to get a bigger distribution channel for RSP, a product Gray had created for Web-enabling RPG programs.

RSP was touted as a superior method of developing Web applications on the IBM i platform. Instead of writing Web interface code separately from the back-end RPG logic, RSP co-mingles the RPG with client-side HTML and JavaScript,

Shield Advanced Solutions has added the capability to replicate IBM i spool files with the latest release of HA4i, its high availability software for IBM i. The new feature was the last “major milestone” preventing HA4i from being considered a full-function HA product, Shield’s president says.

HA4i is the new name that Shield recently gave to RAP, which stood for Receiver Apply Program. Shield overhauled the software with the launch of HA4i version 6.1 in November. The release included features such as a new journal apply processes, a new Web-based interface, auditing improvements, and support for replication of source physical

Q1 Labs has supported the IBM i platform with its security information and event management (SIEM) product, QRadar, for only a few months now. But already it’s landed a SIEM deal with the BGL Group, a provider of a range of insurance products. The deal was announced yesterday.

Founded in 1992, BGL is a privately held group of companies and partnerships that provide insurance coverage for homes, cars, motorcycles, and vans. The company has 3.5 million customers through its subsidiary insurance brokers, such as Budget and Bennetts. It also manages accounts for other U.K. insurance companies through a white label

Software sales may be flat across North America and Europe. But for IBM i software vendors like Magic Software and Vision Solutions, recent announcements indicate the Middle East has become an oasis of opportunity.

Last month, Vision announced that its Middle Eastern sales increased by 20 percent in 2010–the third consecutive year that sales have grown by more than 20 percent. The Irvine, California-based provider of IBM i high availability software attributes its success in the region to solid partnerships, such as the one it has Gulf Business Systems of the United Arab Emirates.

“One of the fundamental reasons

Great Eastern Life Assurance, a large insurance company serving people in Singapore and Malaysia, has tapped systems management tool vendor Help/Systems to help it manage its IBM i servers more efficiently, the software company announced last month.

Great Eastern Life Assurance Co. Ltd. was founded in 1908, which makes it the oldest life insurance company in the region. And with more than $40 billion in assets and 3.8 million policyholders, it also holds the distinction of being the area’s largest life insurance company, according to the company.

In December, Help/Systems announced that the company has licensed one or more members