SAP customers who need real-time analysis of their transactional data may want to take a look at HANA, the new in-memory business intelligence (BI) software officially announced at the ERP giant’s annual SAPPHIRE user conference last week. The offering, which includes software that’s pre-configured to run on hardware from partners like IBM, is said to provide a big shot in the arm for production reporting, with deployment in as few as six weeks.

In-memory databases have become popular over the last few years for analytic and reporting workloads due to their simpler implementations, lighter hardware requirements, and cost savings

Data Storage Corp. (DSC) last week unveiled SafeData Cloud, a new IBM i, AIX, and Windows cloud offering. The new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering will enable customers to run not only their IBM i or Windows disaster recovery (DR) workloads, but also their everyday production workloads, providing another outsourcing options for organizations that don’t want the hassle of running their own hardware.

SafeData, which was bought by DSC last June, has traditionally been associated with online backups and hosted DR and high availability (HA). The company used electronic vaulting software from i365 and HA replication software from

Document production and distribution specialist inFORM Decisions has expanded its multifunction printer support on the IBM i server along with updating its data mapping tool for reports, forms, checks, and other business documents. During the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earlier this month, inFORM president Dan Forster provided IT Jungle with an overview of his company’s developments.

With the increasing popularity of multifunction printers (print, fax, copy, email, and scan capabilities in one machine), Forster was most eager to talk about inFORM Decisions’ iDriver 3.0, which expands on the limited support of MFP devices that is

UNIT4 CODA made a big splash at the recent COMMON conference in Minneapolis. The developer of advanced financial software, which was one of only two pure application vendors at the show, used the venue to showcase its 25-year history supporting the IBM i platform, as well as its alliance with fellow Oracle-slayer, IBM.

CODA Financials may not be a household word in the IBM i world. It doesn’t present a picture or an idea in your mind the same way that “JD Edwards” (gold-standard ERP) or “Dr. Frank Soltis” (grandfather of the AS/400) do.

But the size and

IBM in April gave IBM i its very own zone at the developerWorks website.

“IBM i enthusiasts, thanks for your patience–your zone is ready!” developerWorks newsletters editor John Swanson wrote in his April 22 welcome message. “Our goal is to make sure you never want for IBM i resources.”

There are currently 65 articles on the IBM i zone of developerWorks, with topics ranging from processing DB2/400 indexes in parallel to exploring new features in RDP 8.0. These articles are written by IBMers and third-party IBM i experts, and represent the technical heart of the IBM i zone.

In

LXI was at COMMON Minneapolis earlier this month displaying an early release of its new backup and tape management software for IBM i. The upcoming release of Media Management System (MMS) version 7.1, which is still in alpha, will shift storage of IBM i backup metadata and tape catalog information from the IBM i server it’s backing up to a central Windows Server. LXI says the move to consolidate media information will simplify backups for large, multi-server and multi-LPAR environments.

It could be difficult to navigate large multi-server and multi-LPAR environments with older releases of MMS, LXI representative Eddie Brown

KrengelTech recently launched Krengel Authorize, an IBM i-based credit card authorization product designed to allow customers to process credit card and other electronic payments directly from RPG applications.

Krengel Authorize provides an RPG interface to Authorize.Net, which operates a credit card payment gateway that eliminates the need for customers to develop their own direct connections to the payment processing networks.

With Krengel Authorize, IBM i shops can run their customers’ credit card transactions directly from RPG application, from an e-commerce website, or from phone or catalog orders. Using Krengel Authorize and Authorize.Net, the entire authorization-to-settlement process can be completed

Third-party software vendors should find it easier to embed DBMoto, HiT Software‘s cross-platform database replication engine, into their own products as a result of new API work the BackOffice Associates subsidiary has done with version 7.1.

HiT says it has delivered new APIs with DBMoto version 7.1 that will simplify the process of integrating the software within the context of an enterprise application architecture.

Giacomo Lorenzin, HiT’s managing director, says the open APIs will benefit ISVs, systems integrators, and enterprises by reducing the time and effort required to implement and configure DBMoto. The new API can also enable DBMoto

Preventing unauthorized users from accessing semi-structured and unstructured data on stored on shared folders (including IBM i shops’ IFS) should be easier using the latest release of Varonis‘ Data Governance Suite, which gains new automation and visualization features.

The job of preventing unauthorized access to data is getting more difficult for several reasons. First, the sheer volume of data continues to grow at an exponential rate. Of particular concern is the growth of unstructured and semi-structured data, such as e-mail, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, image files, and SharePoint files, which represents 80 percent of all data and is doubling every

Organizations that use the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts (ASCI) can now monitor and track their jobs via Nagios, an open source system and network monitoring tool, the company announced recently.

ActiveBatch helps organizations manage workloads across IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, OpenVMS, and Mac OS servers. The software allows customers to create schedules based on time or triggers, or build them around different types of constraints. The software, which gained IBM i support in 2009, features a library of pre-built templates that reduce the need to develop custom scripts.

Earlier this month, the Morristown,