Liaison Technologies this week launched an initiative to attract more partners to sell its cloud integration products and services. The company already has a successful business selling integration services through its cloud, thanks to the acquisition last year of HubSpan. Now, the idea is to grow the cloud service brokerage (CSB) business in any way possible, including letting partners sell it as a product, or even as their own white labeled services offering.

Even before buying HubSpan and its sophisticated CSB offering last year, Liaison had many irons in the integration fire. Its pre-HubSpan repertoire included Electronic Commerce Server (ECS),

Micro Focus last week unveiled its latest iteration of the RUMBA terminal emulation suite, which is heavily used by IBM i shops around the world. RUMBA 9.0 introduces a new way to modernize 5250 and 3270 green-screen interfaces into GUI equivalents. The company also introduced three new clients as part of its “RUMBA+” brand, including Windows, Web, and iPad interfaces. Android and Microsoft Surface clients are expected in a few months, company officials say.

With RUMBA 9.0 and RUMBA+, Micro Focus is giving customers new tools to modernize their 5250 and 3270 green screens into richer and easier-to-use graphical interfaces.

Having customers on a legacy product will make you do funny things. For IBM, it meant bowing to pressure and keeping i5/OS V5R4 around for seven years. Microsoft almost doubled that with Windows XP, which will be 13 years old when support ends next year. ASNA also has a legacy customer base that’s dependent on Windows XP-era technology, but a recent update will give them some breathing room as they modernize their systems.

ASNA recently shipped the first new version of ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) in many years. AVR, of course, is ASNA’s flagship product that allows programmers to

HiT Software last week unveiled a new version of its data replication software that’s designed to keep customers’ Google cloud apps in synch with their on premise relational databases. DBMoto Cloud G Edition automatically pushes data from any backend database, such as DB2/400, into the Google App Engine Datastore using the Internet giant’s Web service APIs, providing another way for companies to present their valuable data to new Web and mobile apps.

Google App Engine (GAE) is a platform as a service (PaaS) cloud offering that Google first rolled out as a beta in 2008 and as a fully supported

BVS Tools has rolled out a collection of new software called GreenTools for Google Apps (G4G) that enable users to connect various Google Apps with data and applications residing on IBM i servers. Two G4G apps, including G4GGCP and G4GGCAL, connect IBM i data with Google Cloud Print and Google Calendars through Google’s APIs, and more apps are on the way.

Today’s IT environments have become extremely heterogeneous, and demand extreme flexibility on the part of IT experts and users. In the old days, IT pros may have felt a sense of accomplishment at having hooked an IBM i application

In the supply chain management world, Manhattan Associates is synonymous with warehouse management systems. The company built a solid reputation on the back of its IBM i-based WMS, which is still used by many of the nation’s biggest retail chains. Last week, the company revealed it’s been working quietly for two years to build an “omni-channel” software package that will allow individual stores to fulfill Internet orders–that is, to function like mini warehouses.

The term “omni-channel” was ubiquitous at last week’s annual National Retail Federation (NRF) conference in New York, like white on rice. You could not read any news

When Mestek, a metal manufacturing conglomerate based in Massachusetts, needed to streamline its financial reporting process, it faced two choices: either replace its highly customized IBM i ERP system with a new ERP system with integrated analytics, or augment its investment in IBM i with an add-on reporting tool. Faced with the risks and costs of the first choice, the company chose to augment with IBM‘s Cognos Express.

Mestek and its numerous subsidiaries manufacture a variety of products in the areas of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC), metal-forming, and architectural products. The privately owned company employs 1,800 people in

Infor last week announced that the customer interaction management component of its Epiphany CRM suite, a product called Interaction Advisor, will soon be available on the Salesforce.com platform as software as a service (SaaS) offering.

Interaction Advisor is an inbound marketing application that’s designed to allow businesses to predict customer behavior based on their real-time activity and past responses to interactions, while aiming to improve cross-sell opportunities, reduce churn, and bolster the bottom line.

The software helps to ensure there’s consistency in the offers and promotions that a company makes to its customers across a variety of IT touch points,

JDA Software showed that it’s hip to omni-channel times with the release of Customer Engagement Cloud, a new solution designed to help its traditional retail customers transform themselves into “omni-channel” retailers.

In case you missed it, omni-channel was the big buzz word at last week’s National Retail Federation (NRF) conference in New York. The term omni-channel is the next iteration of multi-channel, and refers to the new ways in which retailers are responding to the new ways that consumers are buying stuff.

Whereas a multi-channel retailer had to worry about satisfying demand originating from the Web, mail order, phone, and

Mainline Information Systems last month acquired Software By Design Inc. (SBDI), a firm that specializes in implementing business intelligence solutions. The acquisition will bolster the Business Analytics group of Mainline, which is one of the largest resellers of IBM Power Systems, mainframes, and System x machines in the country.

SBDI has provided business intelligence solutions to customers of all sizes since it was founded in 1999. The company maintains a staff equipped with BI developers and solution architects who are versed in the BI products from IBM (both Cognos and Cognos Express), Oracle‘s SPSS, Microstrategy, and SAP.