Software Engineering of America wants to shake up the market for OS/400 systems management software. The 22-year-old software vendor from Long Island has traditionally focused on providing utilities for the mainframe. But now, through a partnership with an Australian software firm, the company has launched a suite of nine OS/400 utilities that it calls the REV Suite for AS/400, and it intends to capture its share of the U.S. market.

The Rev Suite for AS/400 was originally developed by RevSoft, a company based in the Australian Gold Coast city of Nerang that provides OS/400 software and services. RevSoft started

As more companies migrate to Web-based applications, the realities of high costs and mediocre performance become apparent. Much of the performance drain is related to bandwidth and network issues. Naturally, the speed at which business-critical applications are delivered has an impact on productivity, and correspondingly the bottom line costs. But the issue of performance is measured in both application speed and the timeframe to implement a Web-based system. Complexity can be a resource hog on the Web and on the implementation schedule.

Obviously, faster is better. But it comes with a price. It factors into not only application delivery, but

Big OS/400 shops looking to consolidate the number of consoles used to manage their collection of AS/400s and iSeries servers may want to check out the new twinax consoles that Visara International launched this month. Visara (formerly Memorex Telex) introduced the ICON-20T, a rack-mountable Lintel computer that serves up to 20 browser-based green-screen console sessions for OS/400 servers, and ICON-1T, which provides a single console session.

While server consolidation has been a big driver for the iSeries in recent years, nobody talks much about console consolidation. When OS/400 servers start to proliferate in data centers, having a dedicated management console

PeopleSoft last week introduced a service pack for its World A8.1 product line that features a new HTML interface, among about 250 other enhancements. Service Pack 6 implements the same new capabilities that PeopleSoft brought to its more widely used World version A7.3 product line in March. However, some within PeopleSoft consider A8.1 to be a “hidden gem” because it’s not talked about much, and it contains some advanced functionality you won’t find in A7.3.

In 1997, J.D. Edwards’ flagship World product line diverged into two separate releases, says PeopleSoft’s director of product strategy for the World product, John Schiff.