Whether you’re seriously looking for IBM i high availability software or just window shopping, here’s a company that should be on your radar: BCS Group. The Florida company has been selling and installing Trader’s Quick-EDD/HA product for the last three years, and has about 100 customers, a company official says. Now, as the exclusive distributor for Quick-EDD in the United States, BCS is expanding efforts to sell what it perceives to be the best and most affordable HA software on the market.

The story about how Business Continuity Specialists (BCS) Group came to be the American distributor for a

inFORM Decisions (IFD) last week unveiled iCapture, a new version of its document scanning and indexing solution designed to work with its IBM i-based document management system called iView. iCapture is an overhauled version of the vendor’s previous document scanning product, called iScan, which IFD says features major enhancements in the areas of data capture, indexing, and integration with PC-based scanners.

IFD first launched iScan in July 2010 to serve the demand from IBM i shops for scanning and indexing paper-based documents into electronic equivalents. iScan was based on an optical character recognition (OCR) scanning engine OEMed from Datacap (acquired

Micro Focus is close to shipping RUMBA version 8.3, an updated release of the terminal emulator that’s popular in IBM i shops. The new release, which should ship in about a month, will bring a new productivity feature making it easier to export data from a 5250 screen to Microsoft Excel. It also features a more modern security architecture that may keep your network security officer’s hair from prematurely turning gray.

Micro Focus started building connections between RUMBA and Microsoft Office with RUMBA 8.1, which shipped in late 2010. That release included an MS Office toolbar in the RUMBA

Rocket Software last week unveiled new releases of three change management products it obtained with its acquisition of Aldon last year. Rocket Aldon Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition) for IBM i was updated with new application deployment capabilities and integration with Apache Subversion, while new releases of the Rocket Aldon Web Portal and Rocket Aldon Report Manager products help organizations track build deployments and user activity, including from smartphones and tablets.

Last week’s announcement of Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition) 6.2 for IBM i, Web Portal 1.2, and Report Manager 1.6 mark the first substantive release of the Aldon software since

FIPS 140-2 is a short, acronym-laden term floating in an IT world filled with short, acronym-laden terms. But for organizations that do business with the U.S. Government, the term FIPS 140-2 is absolutely critical, and determines whether a product has the necessary level of security to be implemented. For customers on the hunt for managed file transfer (MFT) software, the news that Linoma Software has received FIPS 140-2 certification puts its GoAnywhere suite in the government game.

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 is a U.S. government computer security standard that was set by the National Institute of

Business intelligence and analytics software maker Information Builders showed off its latest creations at its annual user conference that’s taking place this week in Orlando, Florida. Among the new offerings are solutions designed to help its WebFOCUS customers take advantage of big data, social media, cloud deployments, and Salesforce.com.

On the big data front, Information Builders announced that WebFOCUS can now be deployed with a column-oriented database, which should substantially improve the performance of certain types of analytic workloads that rely on a large number of queries or are accessing large data sets. The vendor said its column-oriented developments

Three IBM i software vendors are combining efforts to sponsor a free one-day education opportunity in Southern California. The event is being called iNSPIRE 2012 and it’s scheduled for Friday, June 22, at the IBM Center in Costa Mesa.

The session lineup–which is focused on technologies such as application modernization, document management, and high availability–is anchored by two of the top educators in the IBM midrange: Susan Gantner and Jon Paris of Partner400.

Also on the agenda are IBM’s Isabelle Sato, Profound Logic‘s Alex Roytman, inFORM Decisions‘ Alex Rodriguez, and Vision Solutions‘ Steve Romweber. Profound, inFORM,

Kisco Information Systems last week unveiled a new release of WebReport/i, its report distribution tool for the IBM i server. In addition to a new name (it was previously called WebReport/400), version 12 of the product sports the capability to include editable fields in generated PDF forms, as well as new HTTPS and FTP capabilities.

WebReport/i allows IBM i shops to make more effective use of the spool files and reports generated by their applications. The software can automatically convert IBM i spool files to PDF, HTML, TIF, RTF, XLS, or CSV formats, and then distribute them via email, fax,

IBM yesterday unveiled new software and services designed to help customers streamline the application development lifecycle, or what IBM calls “development operations,” or simply DevOps. As part of the announcement, which was made at the annual Rational Collaborate conference in Florida, parts of Rational’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) suite will be made available as a DevOps tool hosted in IBM’s SmartCloud.

The CLM suite, which IBM unveiled at last year’s Collaborate show, is built on IBM’s open development platform, called Jazz, and combines three Rational products, including Requirements Composer, Team Concert, and Quality Manager, in one suite that IBM

Maximum Computer Systems, a New York-based consultancy that specializes in providing solutions for wholesale distributors, is opening a new office in Las Vegas that will enable it to better serve customers who run the Infor10 Distribution Enterprise i (A+) suite from Infor.

MCS is an Infor Gold Channel partner based in Ronkonkoma, New York. The company specializes in Infor10 Distribution Enterprise i, an RPG-based ERP suite for distributors that was previously called Application Plus (A+) when it was owned by Daly & Wolcott. The company has been in business for 23 years, and has been an A+ partner