In the hit TV show “Mission: Impossible,” team members were told “this tape will self-destruct in five seconds,” and it always did, in a tiny puff of smoke. While AS/400 shops typically aren’t involved in fighting international espionage, they do need a (legal) way to keep the prying eyes of lawyers off their backups and archives. Plasmon recently unveiled a new line of Ultra Density Optical (UDO) media cartridges aimed at helping users comply with data-retention regulations, while limiting their legal exposure from keeping certain records unnecessarily long.

Companies today are grappling with a slew of new regulations, including SOX,

Just last week IBM announced plans to crank up its service oriented architecture (SOA) efforts with new hardware and services designed to help companies develop more scalable and flexible applications that are more closely aligned with business goals. Service oriented architecture is a method for redesigning technology foundations and improving interoperability between disparate systems. Big Blue sees it as an important next step in the evolutionary process for IT. Cape Clear Software agrees. However, on matters relating to WebSphere, the two companies are on opposite sides of the fence.

Cape Clear has just announced the availability of its enterprise service

Chick’s Sporting Goods used to rely on several Windows boxes to serve e-mail, among other applications. The MIS manager also used to work nights and weekends managing those Windows servers. But since consolidating those servers onto a single iSeries that runs Domino and its ERP system, the Southern California chain has joined the chorus of former Windows shops who are now signing the song of iSeries.

Founded in 1949, Chick’s Sporting Goods is California’s oldest sports retail chain, even if it’s not the largest. With 11 locations and 1,200 employees, the L.A.-based group is a solidly mid size company, with

Two things can be said about integrating legacy applications: a majority of companies have projects to accomplish integration and few can boast about achieving it. Legacy application integration can be executed in several ways. The most common is terminal emulation for the desktop or the Internet. Red Oak Software takes a different tactic. It creates its Web-to-host connectivity environment through a process referred to as programmatic integration. The company’s latest tool, built on the Eclipse framework, is called the Legacy Composer–Eclipse Edition.

Tools based on programmatic integration rely on data streams for their input, but they distinguish themselves from what