PowerTech is gearing up to launch a new product aimed at helping iSeries shops demonstrate their security controls as a means of achieving regulatory compliance. PowerLock ComplianceMonitor, which is due for release in December, saves administrators time and effort by automating the collection and analysis of audit reports from multiple iSeries. In related news, the Kent, Washington, software company released its “State of iSeries Security” report for 2005, which details some troubling trends.

Like other tools in PowerTech’s PowerLock suite of products, ComplianceMonitor builds off OS/400’s rich collection of security capabilities, and is designed primarily as a time-saving device for

Most people make it a bigger problem than it needs to be. That problem is taking RPG-based core business applications to the Web and converting them into graphical applications. Major stumbling blocks to this process can be quickly clicked off. One is that RPG programmers are not Web programmers. Two is that a great deal of code will need to be rewritten. And, three is that the iSeries cannot or should not play a Web server role.

One company that is hell bent on rearranging these stumbling blocks and turning them into building blocks is Profound Logic, a company

Australian software developer looksoftware recently unveiled a new development tool designed to help iSeries shops expose and publish parts of their applications as Web services. The new product, which will be called soarchitect, is due to ship in about three months. It will work in tandem with other looksoftware products to enable customers to start publishing Web services and make the move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Looksoftware sees SOAs gaining speed over the next five years, and cites a Gartner prediction that 80 percent of small and mid size businesses will deploy SOAs by 2010. The SOA concept is

iSeries shops looking to implement a change management system as part of a regulatory compliance project may want to check out the latest from Aldon, one of the leading developers for this type of software. The company recently unveiled Aldon Lifecycle Manager iSeries Edition version 7.4, which brings new support for independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) and helps simplify the testing of deleted objects and the consolidation of releases.

When an IT department grows to where it has five or more programmers working on the same set of applications, that shop, as rule of thumb, becomes a good candidate