If you’ve been following Microsoft for the last few years, you would have witnessed the software giant executing its unified communication strategy to deliver a next-generation collaboration solution that provides a platform for integrating voice, video, e-mail, and IM, of which the upcoming release of Office Communication Server 2007 is a major part. Not to be outdone, IBM and 3Com yesterday unveiled their own Lotus-based offering, called System i Integrated Collaboration, to challenge Windows supremacy in the emerging market for unified communication systems.

The new System i Integrated Collaboration builds on the voice over IP (VoIP) offering, called System i

The calendar reads spring, which means the snow is melting, grass is growing, and the sounds of baseball will soon emanate from diamonds across the country. It’s also a time of renewal at Centerfield Technology, the DB2/400 performance tool developer from the friendly confines of Rochester, Minnesota. Spring training is starting for the latest addition to Centerfield’s roster: an autonomic SQL performance tool called AutoDBA that should give IT admins with average skills the capability to put up Barry Bonds-like numbers.

Performance-enhancing substances are now verboten in professional baseball. But in the world of IT, professionals are encouraged to

Maximum Availability this month began shipping a major new release of its *noMAX suite of high availability software for System i servers. With the new release, dubbed vnR1, MaxAv has concentrated on adding more autonomic capabilities to the product, to allow it to more quickly recover from problems such as out-of-synch conditions. A slew of newly supported data types, new interfaces, and improvement in auditing further signals the maturation of this product.

Maximum Availability is a New Zealand company that has been selling its collection of remote journaling-based high availability products for the last seven years or so. The company,

System i shops looking to build new Web-based dashboard applications may want to take a look at the latest offerings unveiled by New Generation Software this month. NGS has delivered a new release of its flagship IQ Server and a new release of its Business Performance Dashboard that should make it easier for System i shops to deliver graphical dashboard views of their DB2/400 data, without the level of data massaging that it once required.

NGS launched its Business Performance Dashboard in November 2005 as a way to present non-technical users and executives with data from DB2/400 in the form

CCSS has added real-time disk monitoring to QSystem Monitor version 12, its systems management utility for i5/OS servers. With the new DASD monitoring function, QSystem Monitor customers will get alerts to disk problems, before they slow applications, or worse.

While robust, the System i’s DASD resources are not immune to problems. An innocent change to an audit function, or a tweak of a journaling function, could spawn a chain of events, eventually culminating in surge of auxiliary storage pool (ASP) usage and, potentially, a crashed machine. Considering the cost of DASD from IBM, most shops don’t have the luxury

i5/OS application developer KMR Systems will be modernizing its RPG-based applications using look software‘s collection of tools, it was announced this month.

KMR Systems is a Long Island, New York, company that has been providing consulting and application solutions for the IBM midrange market since 1982. The company develops a series of solutions for various industries, including a benefit funds system, a union management system for labor unions, a claims processing system, and a pension system, among others.

Recently, the company has realized a need to modernize its system with modern interfaces, better integration to Microsoft Office, support for

i5/OS B2B software developer EXTOL and VAI, a developer of ERP software for i5/OS, have entered into a partnership to co-develop and sell their products. Several VAI customers, including Dorcy International and Maple Leaf Farms, are already taking advantage of the heightened integration.

As part of the agreement, the two companies will work to ensure that their products–including VAI’s S2K and EXTOL’s Business Integrator–work well together out-of-the-box, with a minimal amount of configuration required by the user. S2K is now shipping with preconfigured maps between EXTOL and most major trading partners, speeding the implementation of EDI and B2B processes,

You may have heard of the hit TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Now get ready for the business IT version, called “BI for the Warehouse Guy,” a new collection of business intelligence (BI) software, from Q4bis and ICS–designed for persons of the warehouse persuasion.

The stereotypical BI user is somebody who sits in a nice chair, wears a suit, and crunches sales and financial numbers all day long. However, contrary to popular opinion, BI software can also be utilized in a warehouse environment by people who wear hard hats and drive fork lifts, according to Q4bis

When a disaster like Katrina hits, large swaths of infrastructure, such as power grids and communication lines, are taken out, compounding the difficulties of recovery. To help companies, organizations, and first-responders cope during the first hours or days following a disaster, IBM and Cisco Systems yesterday unveiled a new service that bundles electrical generators, phones, satellite and wireless connections, Windows servers, and software into portable units that can be transported by foot or truck into a disaster area.

IBM’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) is no stranger to disasters. The IBM division, like its primary competitor Sungard, maintains

Informatica recently issued a new Web-based product, called On Demand Data Replicator, designed to move data from customers’ Salesforce.com accounts into relational database management systems (RDBMs). The software is based on Informatica’s industrial-strength PowerCenter extract, transform, and load (ETL) software, but runs in Informatica’s data centers instead of customer sites, easing IT workloads while addressing data integration issues.

As organizations continue to adopt software as a service (SaaS) offerings, they’re increasingly faced with data integration and fragmentation issues. Where data resides isn’t as big an issue when all of an organization’s data resides on its servers, protected behind firewalls, with