SAP last week announced additional details of the roadmap for HANA, the in-memory database technology that the German ERP software giant is currently using for business intelligence workloads. Not surprisingly, the plans calls for HANA to become the underlying database powering everyday business transactions in the SAP Business Suite, not just analytic workloads. But before then, SAP’s Sybase database will play a bigger role.

SAP executives have not been shy about telling the world about their grand plans for HANA, which has become an exceptionally popular product for SAP since the company started selling it less than a year ago

Remember when ERP was cool, when all the best companies were doing it? OK, while ERP might have been new for most companies in the roaring 1990s, it hasn’t been cool for a long time, if ever. Today, ERP is a necessary fact of life for companies, but it’s also expensive and time consuming. Some IT companies, like Velocity Technology Solutions, see major changes afoot in the way that we buy and consume ERP software–which could even make ERP cool.

Velocity Technology Solutions is a cloud hosting provider that runs and maintains ERP and related systems for about 240

Artech last month launched a new version of its rapid application development toolset, called GeneXus, that delivers new capabilities to deploy user interface apps to mobile devices based on the Apple iOS, RIM Blackberry, and Google Android platforms. GeneXus X Evolution 2, which supports the IBM i server through generation of Java, RPG, and COBOL, also features support for deployment of applications to the cloud.

Artech is a creator of fourth-generation language (4GL) tools that was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1988 to support IBM‘s legendary AS/400 server line. While the bulk of Artech’s 6,500-plus customers are Latin American,

IBM this month announced a new release of DB2 Connect, a piece of middleware used to connect client applications running on Linux, Unix, or Windows platforms to DB2 database servers running on IBM i and z/OS. With DB2 Connect version 10.1, IBM added support for DB2 for i version 7.1. It also added a number of features for taking advantages of the latest enhancements to DB2 for z/OS.

DB2 Connect enables client applications to create, access, update, control, and manage DB2 databases on host systems using a variety of languages, including SQL, ODBC, JDBC, DB2 APIs, SQLJ DB2 Call Level

Infor is gearing up for Sunday’s start of Inforum 2012, its annual user conference. This year’s show, to be held in Denver, Colorado, combines Inforum and Lawson CUE (conference and user exchange) into a single show for all Infor and Lawson customers. And as luck would have it, Inforum 2012 takes place at the same time that Oracle is hosting its big Collaborate 2012 get-together for its JD Edwards customers.

There is a lot of activity going on right now at Infor as it relates to the Lawson business. Since the merger was finally consummated earlier this month, the

DBi, the drop in replacement for the MySQL database running under IBM i, is now generally available from Zend Technologies. The database is fully supported by Zend, providing a secure and straightforward path for IBM i shops to run prepackaged PHP applications designed to work with MySQL.

The new database ships as DBi version 5.1.59, according to Zend’s release notes. The package also includes the latest IBMDB2i storage engine, which enables PHP applications that use MySQL to actually store data in DB2/400.

Zend’s release notes describe how to install DBi on the IBM i server via FTP. The product’s

IBM i shops can support users and applications running in different time zones within the same logical partition (LPAR) using the latest software from INPRO International. The company recently announced that this capability is available in TZN/400 6.1.P.

According to INPRO, the new release of its TZN/400 tool allows IBM i shops to support dozens of time zones in the same LPAR. Users in different parts of the world interact with their applications and reports in their local time, instead of the time zone in which the server happens to be physically located.

IBM i has supported multiple time

The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007.

Things seem to be going well for the Joomla CMS, which the organization says is used to power about 2.7 percent of the world’s websites, or about 1.6 million websites by one count.

And there’s a lot more in the pipeline. The organization says that at the end of March 2011, the CMS had been downloaded 22 million times.

If you’ve visited the IBM i homepage since the big PureSystems launch a week ago, you’ve noticed that things looks a bit different. IBM i regulars will see that familiar navigational aids to view information about IBM i hardware, software, solutions, and news are gone, in favor of a sleeker, more modern look that features easy access to Twitter and Facebook.

IBM is definitely on the cutting edge of IT, as it proved with last week’s launch of the new PureSystems line of systems, which feature autonomic management capabilities that should dramatically reduce the care and feeding required to

The big gold rush in the cloud is on, and the latest outfit to strike it rich is Varicent, a developer of compensation and sales performance management software. It was snapped up last week by a cloud- and analytics-hungry IBM for an undisclosed sum.

Varicent’s compensation and sales performance software is used by companies that use salespeople to drive much of their revenue. By more effectively managing the sales-related data–which is often spread across PCs and spreadsheets–Varicent can drive more profits from sales, and ensure that the variable rate of compensation for the salespeople is “aligned with strategic business