Question: What do ACOM Solutions and deposed North African dictators have in common? Answer: They both claim a 100 percent customer satisfaction rating. OK, nobody outside of Africa actually believes the dictators’ claims that they have the full support of their people. But there is good reason to believe that ACOM did in fact record a perfect score with its customer service during the month of November. That’s because, for many IBM i software vendors, delivering good customer service is a very big deal.

ACOM says its IBM i tech support center in Atlanta, Georgia, pitched a perfect game in

Q&A with UC4 on the Future of Workload Automation

Virtualization and cloud computing are making IT a very complicated place. Enterprises in the future will need to utilize these productivity-boosting technologies, but do so without losing their hold on existing processes. One vendor that’s working on forward-looking workload automation tools is UC4. Recently, two UC4 executives, Fred Kohout, chief marketing officer, and product marketing executive Kerry Lebel briefed IT Jungle on UC4’s work in this area.

IT Jungle How do companies know if they need workload automation software? Why should they be looking into this?

Fred Kohout We find

IBM i shops that use managed file transfer (MFT) software from nuBridges will be happy to know that the latest iteration of nuBridges Exchange i includes an implementation of the SFTP protocol that’s native to the IBM i OS. nuBridges says customers will see easier implementation and maintenance, and better throughput compared to the previous iteration of the Secure Shell-based protocol in Exchange i, which was written in Java.

nuBridges Exchange i is an MFT solution that enables organizations to manage the secure distribution of files among internal and external users. Like most MFT solutions, Exchange i supports a range

A new release of the JobQGenie software from Shield Advanced Solutions does a better job of sharing IBM i job data between primary and backup target servers, which should lead to smoother IBM i operations and more accurate job re-creation following a high availability failover or disaster recovery scenario.

JobQGenie was developed to address a functionality gap in IBM i high availability and disaster recovery software. While HA and DR products generally do a thorough job of replicating data, program objects, and settings like user profiles, they don’t provide much functionality when it comes to replicating job queues between source

If you had a security audit tomorrow, would you pass? Security insiders say, more often than not, that security holes are numerous at IBM i shops, and are quite big in some cases. For IBM i security software vendor Cilasoft, the overall lack of good security policies in United States companies is leading to an uptick in sales of software and services.

Dan Riehl is one of the top security experts in the IBM i community. He is currently the head of U.S. operations for Cilasoft, a French security software company that’s grabbing business in the United States since

IBM i shops can now get access to the batch-job performance boosting power of iStream on a monthly basis. Midrange Performance Group, the U.S. distributor for iBoost Systems‘ iStream software, last week announced that rentals for iStream will start at $995 per month.

iStream is a unique product designed to increase the throughput of IBM i batch jobs. The software, which iBoost Systems introduced to North America via MPG last year , works by using a command substitution technique to basically split a single-streamed batch job into multiple streams that can better utilize the horsepower of Power Systems,

Information Builders last week announced new software that will turn mobile phones into client interfaces for business intelligence workloads. WebFOCUS Mobile BI will enable users to not only consume and manipulate pre-built reports and dashboards, but also create charts, thanks to an embedded analytics engine. Best of all, the software is compatible with WebFOCUS running on IBM i, and it requires no additional license fees or servers.

WebFOCUS Mobile BI turns iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, and Blackberry phones into clients for BI workloads. The software uses either Adobe Flash or HTML technology to create a self-contained application that

Symtrax is now taking advantage of an SAP-sanctioned printing protocol to grab spool files from the ERP system. A new release of Compleo for SAP features the BC-XOM connector, which should reduce dependencies between the ERP installation and output streams, thereby boosting flexibility and minimizing maintenance costs.

SAP developed BC-XOM specifically to provide external document management systems such as Compleo with an open interface to the SAP NetWeaver spool system, and encourages software vendors such as Symtrax to adopt BC-XOM. That is exactly what Symtrax has done with Compleo for SAP version 4.1.

According to Symtrax, adopting BC-XOM delivers

Everybody wants data in a familiar format. Those in the United States read today’s date as 3/8/2011, while to many people in the rest of the world, that date corresponds with August 3, 2011. Development tool maker mrc recently unveiled an enhancement in its m-Power tool designed to eliminate even more perplexing data conversion problems when an application reads from, or writes to, a database.

The example above pales in comparison with some of the obscure date formats programmed into databases. For example, many computer systems (including the IBM i) often use the Julian calendar, which uses the Century-Year-Day (C-YY-DDD)

IntelliChief, which was recently spun out of IBM i forms management company Quadrant Software, has made some big personnel moves recently as it looks to establish itself as an independent provider of content management and workflow solutions for the IBM i community.

In the past month, IntelliChief announced two new hires, including Michael Rooney as the new vice president of sales and marketing, and Michael Jasper as the new partner development manager. The two men were hired by a management team led by co-CEOs and co-founders Gary Langton and Peter DiPierro.

Rooney comes to IntelliChief from a Massachusetts