JDA Software Group says it still has a valid OS/400 strategy and strong support from its iSeries customers, despite the new Microsoft Windows .NET-based product portfolio unveiled earlier this year and the new partnership with Intel it announced last week. Like many of IBM‘s iSeries ISVs, JDA, whose OS/400-based merchandise management system and supply chain optimization software is used by hundreds of customers, has been forced to make a difficult decision between .NET and J2EE.

The comments made last week by Peter Charness, JDA’s chief product officer and its senior vice president of global marketing, would seem to leave

When you realize the labor costs involved with setting up, running, and maintaining computer hardware and software surpasses the cost of the equipment itself by factors that sometimes reach as high as 20, is it any wonder why autonomic features create so much interest? Lakeview Technology, an IBM Premier Partner and a major ISV in the iSeries market, has recently loaded its two high availability products–ha1 and ha Lite–with autonomic features designed to simplify the process and reduce the long-term costs.

High availability, or managed availability as Lakeview likes to refer to it, is the consistent and predictable access

Companies will gain greater control over the distribution of their business reports with a new release of the StarQuery business intelligence tool, a graphical and easy to use alternative to Query/400 developed by Symtrax. StarQuery 2.0, announced last week, includes a new scheduling component that automatically runs queries against supported databases, such as DB2/400, at pre-set times. The new scheduling component also brings new distribution capabilities that utilize the ubiquity of the Internet and the PDF format.

Los Angeles-based Symtrax aimed to make life easier for two groups of users when it introduced StarQuery about a year-and-a-half ago.

nuBridges rolled out a new iSeries software and services offering last week designed to help companies that handle credit card data meet the impending deadline for complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard mandate. nuBridges truExchange PCI Secure enables OS/400 shops to implement encryption within their DB2/400 fields and Internet transport mechanisms, and is designed to prevent the theft of credit card information.

If you’ve never heard of the credit card industry’s PCI Data Security Standard or Visa’s Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) that it’s modeled after, you’re not alone. With so many other compliance mandates, such