S2 Systems and IBM last week announced the availability of S2’s online transaction processing system on the iSeries-Linux platform. The OpeN/2 OLTP engine is the heart of a flexible software suite that can be expanded with check capture, ATM, point-of-sale, gift card, and other add-on modules. Companies in the banking, telecommunications, and retail industries have used OpeN/2 on Unix, mainframe, and fault-tolerant Windows servers, and now iSeries shops can power their payment networks with S2’s software.

S2 Systems has more than 18 years of experience in developing transaction processing systems. As a former subsidiary of fault-tolerant computer maker Stratus Technologies

It can be one of the most irritating things when dealing with computerized telephone systems. Once you’ve “zeroed out” from a phone tree to talk to a real live human, you have to repeat all the account information you just entered into the keypad. iMessaging Systems, a developer of OS/400 interactive voice response software, says it has solved this dilemma with its new iVoice-Agent Integrator, which maintains data as you are transferred from a computerized session to a live agent.

The new Agent Integrator software, which iMessaging Systems announced at the recent COMMON conference, works with iVoice, the Merrimack,

IBM is attempting to entice small and midsized OS/400 shops to adopt its Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) page description language through a new bundle of hardware, software, and services it calls Infoprint Express for iSeries. AFP has largely been used in high-volume, mission-critical printing environments, but IBM says that any iSeries shop can benefit from AFP, especially with the enhancements in the latest release of its AFP-based electronic document delivery software, Infoprint Server for iSeries V5R3.

IBM officials say AFP is more reliable than other page description languages because it enables bidirectional communication between a printer and computer. With AFP’s

Mobile employees will be able to access and update DB2/400 data using their cell phones or other Web-enabled wireless devices with Touchtone‘s new Wintouch for WebSphere application. The software is a collection of “portlets,” served from IBM‘s WebSphere Portal Server software, which provide access to certain functions in the OS/400-based Wintouch CRM application, such as order entry or account summary screens. Eventually, the entire Wintouch suite will be delivered as portlets.

Wintouch is one of the few native OS/400 CRM programs that use the DB2/400 database and connect directly to customers’ OS/400-based ERP and home-grown AS/400 applications. The