IBM said in May that it would keep up a steady rate of OS/400 server announcements as it rolls out the Power5-based machines, and today Big Blue is making good on that promise. The word on the street two weeks ago was that IBM would be launching the four-way eServer i5 Model 550 and extending the Model 570 to 16-way processing as it debuted the AIX-based eServer p5 variants of the “Squadron” servers. The Model 570 made it, but the Model 550 didn’t.

Two weeks ago, I was pretty convinced that the Model 550 was going to come out soon,

New OS/400 portal software is available from IBM as part of its Solutions Builder Express portfolio of pre-built software templates. Last week Big Blue launched five new “Starting Points,” which are templates designed to help resellers or system integrators instigate implementations in areas, such as e-commerce Web sites, or analytics software. The new template IBM delivered for the iSeries is called the Collaborative Community and Employee Portals for IBM eServer iSeries.

The Employee Portal for iSeries is designed for companies that can take advantage of an intranet, or portal, that gives employees a single point of access to their personal

For some people, it can be difficult to get excited about software change management (SCM) software, but Dan Magid is not one of them. Magid, president of SCM vendor Aldon, is energized about his company’s new product, the Application Lifetime Management Suite, which he says is the culmination of six years of work and will help put the eServer i5 firmly in control of code management and deployment of OS/400, Linux, AIX, and Windows applications.

Magid remembers going to a presentation by IBM‘s chief iSeries scientist, Frank Soltis, six or seven years ago, when Soltis spoke about a

MAPICS and Cognos have almost doubled the number of key performance indicators in the business intelligence software they sell to MAPICS manufacturing customers, the two companies recently announced. MAPICS Enterprise Business Intelligence for iSeries now includes more than 400 key performance indicators, which should make it easier for executives and managers to make decisions about inventory rates, sales forecasts, accounts receivables, and other aspects of manufacturing operations.

MAPICS Enterprise Business Intelligence for iSeries is an OEM’ed version of Cognos’ Windows-based business intelligence software that has been pre-mapped to MAPICS data held in the DB2/400 database. The software features a multidimensional,