ERP developer Infor is getting into the cloud business with its hosting partner, Abacus. Several of Infor’s IBM i-based ERP applications will be offered under the new cloud offering, which will also give customers access to professional services to help them upgrade their ERP software and their IBM i OS. The partners are expected to announce their joint offering, which is called the System i Cloud, during the COMMON conference at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California this week.

Abacus Solutions has been providing cloud hosting through its IBM “i” in the Cloud offering for the last three years.

There is a stream of thought among business intelligence software vendors that says the IBM i server is a lousy place to put a data warehouse. But that bias didn’t sway the IT folks at Peppermill Resorts, a Reno, Nevada-based chain of casino resorts that recently went live on an IBM i-based data warehouse that has resulted in much faster data extracts, much fresher data for marketing analysis, and significantly speedier production systems.

Peppermill Resorts is the largest privately held casino group in Nevada. The company runs six casinos (five with hotels) in Reno, Sparks, Henderson, and Wendover. In addition

How do you transform application modernization from something that appeals to techno geeks who love the challenge of coding magic into something that gets the attention of the C-level executives with the big picture business plans? Make it simple and make it platform independent. And let them know the in-house IT skills can handle the job. That pretty much sums up what Profound Logic has done with its latest release of Profound UI.

Credit the product development team at Profound with its continual efforts in adding enhancements to its tools for building Web and mobile applications as well as modernizing

If there were flags for RPG and IBM i, looksoftware would be waving them. At its annual user conference, which is cleverly named “lookahead,” there was plenty of “can do” for the IBM midrange advocates in attendance. CEO Brendan Kay was noticeably energized during his closing session Thursday and it carried over to our conversation afterward as he spoke in glowing terms about the IBM i platform, RPG programmers, and the projects completed and under way at looksoftware customer sites.

Accomplishments rather than a new product focus dominated at the conference. Kay was obviously pleased that with the last major

Halcyon Software yesterday unveiled its Document Management System, a new product designed to streamline the creation, distribution, and archiving of content from IBM i servers and help customers move to a paperless office. The vendor also used the COMMON conference taking place this week in Anaheim, California, as a springboard to launch new versions of its job scheduler and system monitoring tool for the IBM i server.

Document Management System 3.0

Halcyon’s new Document Management System gives users a way to transform raw IBM i spool file content into more refined-looking documents. Once the spool files have been transformed, they

Over the past three decades, ASG Software Solutions has built a solid reputation as a provider of infrastructure automation software, primarily for IBM mainframe environments, which constitutes 90 percent of its customer base. Thanks to several recent acquisitions, the software company is now providing solutions to help customers automate their cloud environments, too.

The roots of ASG trace back to 1981, the year that former Marine and General Motors system analyst Arthur Allen retired to Naples, Florida, after a 25-year career that culminated in selling his first company, Allen Services Corporation, for $18 million. But instead of playing tennis all

Surprisingly poor data protection strategies are costing companies big bucks, according to a recent survey commissioned by EVault. The Seagate subsidiary found that most of the data loss instances, which can cost a company tens of millions of dollars, could have been prevented with an investment in better data protection.

EVault’s survey, which was conducted in the U.S., the U.K., and France, generated some interesting factoids about the state of data protection and data loss. For example, it found that 20 percent of organizations that manage between 2 TB and 7 TB of data suffered a data loss in

Jinfonet Software last month unveiled JReport 11, the newest version of its Java-based reporting software, which can run on the IBM i server. Version 11 introduces new data visualization capabilities, new dashboard options, and the capability to view reports on iOS devices.

JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that, up to this point, included three core modules, including a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, and an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module. The software runs on any Java-based Web application server, and is typically utilized as an embedded reporting tool for other Web applications.

Organizations that back up their data using FalconStor Software‘s virtual tape library (VTL) can now deduplicate their data as the backup is executing, thanks to newly introduced support for inline deduplication with FalconStor VTL 7.5.

FalconStor VTL is a backup and recovery solution that it sells either as a pre-configured appliance (or a cluster of appliances), or as software that customers install on their own X86 servers. By backing up to disk instead of tape, the VTL offering helps speed its customers’ backups and also provides more flexibility. The product supports the Power Systems server and IBM i environments,

Safestone Technologies recently added support for Linux with its Compliance Center for IBM Power Systems. The audit and compliance reporting tool now works across all three Power Systems operating systems: IBM i, AIX, and Linux.

Safestone originally launched its Compliance Center software for IBM i back in 2010. The software takes the grunt work out of sifting through server logs and configuration settings, gathering the pertinent data, stripping out the unimportant stuff, and arranging it into an acceptable report format to hand to your auditor to prove compliance with a range of industry regulations.

The U.K. security software company followed