Multinational companies that need their IBM i applications to support users in multiple languages may fine the latest Web enablement software from Profound Logic to their liking. With Profound UI version 4.7, which debuted last week, Profound is including a new translation database that makes it easier to support multiple languages in the same application. A new code editor and the capability to persist grid changes from session to session round out the release.

With around 200 paying Profound UI customers and about 500 installations around the world, Profound Logic’s developers are keeping busy with fixes, updates, and change requests

It’s an IT truism that the easier and more intuitive one makes a user interface, then the more likely users will be to actually use them. This was the big problem with the first generation of screen scrapers, which created awful looking screens that didn’t work much better than the green screens they replaced. The new generation of 5250 screen converters, such as the Presto offering from Business Computer Design Int’l., are heads above what was possible a decade ago.

Presto is an on-the-fly GUI generator for green-screen interfaces that BCD debuted in 2008. It works by intercepting the

The IBM midrange community, as a group, can be influential. But many individuals are unaware of the power of advocacy and what it can mean for their own organizations. Like a flashlight in a dark cave, advocacy for the IBM i system can prevent companies from making uninformed decisions.

There are proven advocacy successes, but there are also instances when the lack of advocacy results in the IBM i becoming a forgotten entity, a misunderstood system, and the black sheep of the IT department. It’s fair to say that too often the information about the i is locked up in

Infor has delayed its new hosted SkyVault business analytics offering, and now plans to launch it in early 2014, the company said last week. The offering–which combines Amazon‘s Redshift database and Infor’s own BI, dashboard, and data integration tools–is a key part of Infor’s big data analytics strategy, and Infor expects it to bolster the big data strategies of its big ERP customer base, too.

Infor originally announced SkyVault at the Inforum 2013 conference in May, when the company said it expected the hosted offering to debut by the end of the year. That original GA date has apparently

Organizations that adopt the newest version of Halcyon Software‘s Advanced Reporting Suite can use the software to report on the performance of their AIX and Linux environments, not just IBM i and Windows, the company announced last month.

Advanced Performance Suite is a Windows- and SQL Server-based tool that Halcyon launched two years ago to generate performance reports for IBM i and Windows server environments.

The software collects and collates various systems management metrics of production server environments, such as percentage performance against SLAs, processor loading, CPU, memory and disk, SAN utilization, performance response times, and resource utilization. The

Magic Software last week announced that it has added an in-memory data grid element to xpi, its application integration platform. Magic’s IMDG, as it calls the new grid living in the Magic xpi Server software, will deliver higher performing integration services required by new cloud, mobile, and big data applications.

Magic designed xpi (formerly iBolt) so non-programmers could build real-time connections between two or more applications in a loosely coupled manner. The software uses a combination of graphical business process modeling, application-specific adapters, and wizards to create composite applications that connect processes residing in a variety of systems, including IBM

Developers who are writing applications that use Google Cloud SQL and the App Engine Datastore for Google can now use HiT Software‘s DBMoto data replication tools to hook into “legacy” data stores (such as IBM i apps) and feel good about it because they’re certified.

The certification performed by HiT for its DBMoto and DBMoto cloud G Edition is key, as it added visibility to the pool of developers who are riding “the Big G’s” cloud platform. This is good news for HiT Software, the BackOffice Associates subsidiary that moves data to and from DB2 for IBM i databases,

Alliance Storage Technologies (ASTI), which bought Plasmon’s Ultra Density Optical (UDO) business in 2009, bolstered its grip on the worldwide market for UDO products last month when it completed the acquisition of the UDO distribution business of Verbatim, which continues to manufacture UDO media.

UDO may be dead in many people’s eyes. After all, Plasmon, which developed the technology with the idea of serving the long-term data storage needs of IBM mainframe and IBM i customers in heavily regulated industries, couldn’t make a viable business out of it and called it quits.

But the folks at ASTI–in particular its CEO,

Fiserv doesn’t often advertise it, but it is a big driver of IBM servers with a pair of core banking applications, Signature and Premier, that run on the IBM i OS. Lately, the Brookfield, Wisconsin, software company has been selling lots of add-on solutions to these IBM i customers.

In September, Fiserv announced that The First National Bank of Long Island implemented its Common Origination Platform to help price and write consumer, business, and mortgage lending needs. FNBLI has run the Signature application on IBM midrange gear since 1987, and will begin using the Common Origination Platform in application service

Sencha last month rolled out an update to its Sencha Touch framework that makes it easier to develop HTML5 applications that work more like native mobile apps written for iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry devices.

Sencha (formerly ExtJS) develops a JavaScript library for developing touch-enabled apps that execute in browsers running on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. The framework uses HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to create user interface “themes” that make apps look like they were developed for specific operating systems.

With the Sencha Touch 2.3, the software offers support for additional themes, including iOS 7, previous iOS versions, Android, Windows