Companies that find it increasingly difficult to get good help for their old, unsupported, or heavily customized IBM i-based ERP systems may be interested in a new offering recently unveiled by Precision Solutions Group (PSGi). The company is expanding its existing technical support business, which covers the PRMS, PRISM, and JDE World systems, to include just about any manufacturing- or distribution-focused ERP system that runs on the IBM i platform.

The rise in popularity of the third-party maintenance business is directly tied to the lack of value that customers perceive they get from ERP vendors. Third-party support providers like Rimini

The company formerly known as Speedware is today officially changing its name to Fresche Legacy. CEO Andy K. says the new name better reflects the new direction the Montreal, Quebec, company has taken in recent years. Along with the name change, Fresche Legacy today is expected to announce the acquisition of the iModernize suite of RPG migration tools from the German company Sykora.

The name Fresche Legacy is officially one day old, but the company behind it has an eventful 36-year legacy. Originally founded as Info-Boutique and later called Infocentre, the company focused on developing applications for travel

The folks at Arpeggio Software unveiled a free utility last month that enables the zipping and unzipping of files on the IBM i server. ARP-ZIP, as the software is called, supports a variety of common zip file formats, and also gives users the capability to encrypt files. It does this while running natively on the IBM i server and providing a 5250 interface.

Arpeggio’s new ARP-ZIP supports the capability to compress or archive IBM i files using many commonly used zip file formats, including ZIP, TAR, JAR, GZIP, and BZIP2. It also supports the capability to encrypt and decrypt compressed

Integrated Custom Software is now shipping FormSprint Version 201201, a new release of its electronic document management software for the IBM i server. With this release, the company has added several new features that should be useful to customers, such as better duplex controls and support for encrypting generated PDF files.

FormSprint is a document management software solution that’s used by more than 1,000 IBM i shops across a variety of industries. At its most basic level, FormSprint enables companies to go from using expensive and inflexible preprinted forms and line printers to using software-based form overlays, blank paper stock,

Bytware last week unveiled a new version of its line of message management and alerting software for IBM i, which includes MessengerConsole and MessengerPlus. With version 7, the products gain new options for using email to notify administrators of potential problems with the IBM i server. Better support for multi-processor servers, support for pagers, and an update to the message archive are also part of this release.

MessengerConsole and its little brother, MessengerPlus, are designed to help automate IBM i operations by continuously monitoring the various message queues, logs, and journals for critical messages. The software can be configured to

Infor last week unveiled Inforce Everywhere, a new solution that enables customers to move their on-premise ERP data into cloud-based CRM systems hosted by Salesforce.com.

Infor created Inforce Everywhere to simplify data integration tasks for customers. Data updated by their ERP systems will be automatically available in their CRM implementations at Salesforce.com, thereby eliminating the need to built point-to-point integration flows.

Another benefit is this: Any additional applications that an Infor customer runs on Salesforce.com’s platform will also have access to the data originating in the ERP system. There are a plethora of social media and mobile applications available

Rimini Street is expanding the breadth of services it offers in support of customers’ JD Edwards environments. The company this month announced the general availability of its CNC Managed Services offering, in which it will provide full support for its JD Edwards customers’ Configurable Network Computing environments.

CNC is the JDE EnterpriseOne network architecture, and is important for many aspects of EnterpriseOne ERP implementations. Rimini says it began providing CNC-related services in 2011, but it wasn’t until this month that the company announced the general availability of the new service.

Rimini will focus on five areas of CNC support. Under

If you’re a social media greenhorn who can’t tell a Twitter feed from a Facebook wall posting or a microblog from a YouTube video, then perhaps you’d be a good candidate for IBM‘s new Social Media Boot Camp program.

IBM says its eight-week social media boot camps help small and midsize businesses get the skills they need to successfully engage in social media, and integrate social media into their organizations’ daily activities, particularly for marketing and sales efforts. The boot camps include one-on-one time with IBM’s social media “coaches,” who set goals for boot camp attendees and help them

IT shops that are concerned about the chain of custody of their backup tapes after they’re sent off site may be interested in a new tape tracking solution unveiled recently by Recall.

The Georgia company, which stores physical and digital assets for more than 80,000 companies at 300 temperature-controlled “operations centers” around the world, this month unveiled ReQuest Web, a new app that allows customers to track the custody of their backup tapes through a Web portal.

ReQuest Web tells customers the location of their tapes or other media, and also displays proof-of-service signatures for tracking purposes. Customers can

ASG Software Solutions last week unveiled ASG-Zena 3.1, a new release of its multi-platform workload automation utility, which supports the IBM i environment.

The new release of the job scheduler brings several enhancements that the vendor says will improve workload automation tasks. A new graphical process whiteboard will provide a handy way to visualize process flows, minimize redundant definitions, and provide more flexible scheduling of machine resources.

Zena 3.1 also gets better support for VMware environments. Specifically, the new release will automatically provision the required VMware resources as part of the job execution task. This was also listed as an