“We’re the best company you never heard of,” began Will Pulley, the director of customer relations for Software and Management Associates (SMA) at a press conference during the COMMON show earlier this month. Whether the Texas company makes the best IBM i job scheduler and message automation tools is debatable, but there’s little question SMA has some work to do if it wants to appear on the radar screens of North American IBM i shops.

The appearance at COMMON was a good first start for SMA, which has roots in the IBM mainframe world, as well as NASA, which SMA

When looksoftware hitched its application development wagon to Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, it was well aware of the work that needed to be done. In the past year it has RPG OA-enabled its most popular green-screen alternative and is now poised to do the same with the remainder of its multi-channel approach. Last week, at the company’s annual user conference, which it calls lookahead, the company talked about soon-to-be GA products and what it will take to spark application modernization projects in IBM midrange shops.

“One of the things we are really focusing on is providing environments that support

IBM i shops that are looking for tools to create mobile interfaces for RPG applications should take a look at the latest release of Valence from CNX. The software company used the recent COMMON conference in Minneapolis as a venue for launching Valence 3.0, which adds the capability to create touch-driven user interfaces for mobile devices like the iPhone and Android phones.

CNX launched Valence in May 2008 as a way to create modern-looking Web 2.0 applications that run on the IBM i server’s Apache Web server and are powered by RPG business logic. The product has several components,

Bsafe Information Systems, a developer of security software for IBM i and z/OS servers, changed its name to Enforcive. The move helps to eliminate any confusion a prospect might have separating the BSAFE line of cryptography products from RSA with the IBM i tools offered by Enforcive. The company also unveiled Enterprise Security 7.1, which adds coverage of the IBM i message queue and system history logs, and enhances compliance management tools.

Enforcive, which today goes by the full legal name Enforcive Information Systems 1983 Ltd., was founded in Israel 28 years ago to develop security tools for

High availability and disaster recovery solution provider iSam Blue is determined to make a name for itself by driving down the cost of HA-DR for IBM i shops. As companies depend on the Internet for their livelihood, business continuity becomes a growing issue and downtime becomes increasingly costly. For a fee starting at $50 a day iSam will provide a recovery point within minutes and a recovery time of four hours or less.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because iSam Blue president and CEO Robert Seal was working at iTera five years ago when that company made

IntelliChief recently rolled out the biggest enhancement to its paperless process management (PPM) software since the company and the product was spun out from Quadrant Software in December. With IntelliChief version 3.2, the company has bolstered its optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, added new workflow capabilities, and improved its archive.

IntelliChief is a suite of Windows products designed to help organizations transition to using electronic documents and workflows with their business processes. The suite includes functionality for handling the input of paper or electronic documents, the output of electronic documents, and the flow of work in between.

On the input

Replacing pre-printed forms with internally created company documents, laser MICR checks, and barcode or thermal labels has been a popular cost-cutting measure in IBM midrange shops for many years. And for 20 years Quadrant Software has been cranking out integrated applications that have pleased a boatload of customers. One of the company’s flagship products, Formtastic, has recently been enhanced and released as version 5.4.5. The announcement was made at the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Minneapolis.

Topping the list of improvements are improvements in printer routing, document merge processes, the E-Mail Gateway, barcode creation fields, and support for

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union slashed its IBM i server backup times by more than 90 percent and its X64 server backup times by about 80 percent as a result of the implementation of i365‘s EVault Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliances, the IT vendor announced last week. The Phoenix-based credit union made the move to the EVault disk- and cloud-based backup solution after it determined tape backups could no longer adequately protect its 400-server environment.

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union provides banking and financial services to about 370,000 Arizonans through more than 50 branches in Gila, Maricopa, and Pinal

Your IBM i administrators can be awakened in the dead of night with a phone call to alert them to batch job problems when they use the latest release of the JAMS job scheduler from MVP Systems Software.

MVP recently announced that JAMS version 5.3 can deliver voice and text messages over the phone. The new feature, which is enabled through integration with Twilio‘s Web-based voice and SMS offerings, gives JAMS customers another way to alert administrators and operators to problems encountered by the cross-platform job scheduler.

“No one jumps out of bed for an email. But the

Magic Software is targeting Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones with a new initiative to deliver access to enterprise applications from mobile devices, which it announced last week. The company eventually plans to natively support all major mobile platforms with uniPaaS, its flagship rich Internet application (RIA) development and runtime framework that deploys on IBM i servers, among others.

Magic has always touted platform independence as one of the primary differentiators of its application development tools. Its current uniPaaS offering, which uses a model-driven development paradigm, builds on Magic’s 4GL roots, and provides customers with a degree of future-proofing, in terms