The most widely used and trusted ERP package for OS/400 is now available preloaded on a new eServer i5 server, starting at $50,000. Last week PeopleSoft announced its new World Express bundle, which includes a full license for World that’s customized for the buyer’s industry, a new i5 Model 520 server, and implementation services from a certified partner. Executives say the bundle offers small and midsized businesses a good alternative to Wintel applications.

“Why would you have the same operating system you use to play solitaire run your enterprise?” Dave Siebert, PeopleSoft’s World manager, asked his audience at the COMMON

One of the software vendors making its debut at the COMMON conference in San Antonio last week was Framework Systems, a Danish company that has developed a Web-enablement toolset for OS/400 applications. The iSeries2web contains a collection of XML-based built-in functions that let companies separate presentation logic from business logic in RPG applications. As a result, users can interact with OS/400 applications from practically anywhere, through standard HTML screens, instead of 5250 displays.

The OS/400 server’s tight integration has been considered an advantage since it debuted. With an integrated relational database, lighting-quick execution of RPG business logic, and lightweight

Companies with a need for OS/400 high availability software that supports WebSphere MQ can now add iTera to their list of potential providers. Last week at the COMMON conference in San Antonio, iTera announced the general availability of Echo2 V4R1, which, in addition to supporting WebSphere MQ, includes a redesigned auditing process that iTera says is so advanced that it can’t say much about it, for fear of helping its competitors.

Echo2 is one of the new breed of OS/400 high availability software products that rely entirely on IBM‘s remote journaling technology as its underlying replication method. Since Salt

PFSweb, a $280 million provider of fulfillment services for Pfizer, Shell, and other companies, is now selling licenses for the software it uses to build integrated ecommerce Web sites for its clients, the company announced last week at COMMON. GlobalMerchant CommerceWare 2.0 pairs a Windows-based e-commerce engine with a set of tools and templates specifically designed to extend data from RPG and COBOL ERP applications to the Web sites.

As a business process outsourcer (BPO) with a huge distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee, and call centers at various locations, PFSweb likes to call itself “the brand behind the