For many European software companies, the United States can be a difficult market to crack. In addition to differences in customs and language, the whole buying process in the U.S. is different than it is in Europe. For years, the French developer Arcad Software has tried to break into the lucrative U.S. market. Now, with the latest launch of the Arcad suite and an expansion of its office in New Hampshire, Arcad is gearing up for a sustained push into the U.S.

Arcad Software sells a unique mix of programmer utilities for the System i platform. At the heart of

This had to be one of the best COMMON conferences for Alex Roytman, chief executive of Profound Logic Software. Not only did Profound’s customer, Walt Disney World, win a System i Innovation Award for the work they did modernizing an i5/OS lodging management application, but Profound also unveiled a new product, called Genie, that has the potential to bring in many more System i shops looking to get started with modernization.

Roytman was spotted entering the Anaheim Convention Center last Tuesday, the morning after IBM held its third annual System i Innovation Awards ceremony, where Walt Disney World won

iMessaging Systems, a developer of software that connects i5/OS applications with telephones, unveiled a new release of its iNspire Call Center Suite last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. With the new version, iMS has adopted the session initiation protocol (SIP) standard, which will enable its iNspire solution to integrate more easily with voice over IP (VoIP) systems, including the System i IP Telephony solution that IBM and 3Com have put together.

iMS helps companies create voice-enabled applications for their i5/OS servers that include interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing, custom screen pops, automatic call distribution

ADVANCED BusinessLink officially launched a new product called Strategi SOA last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. While the majority of development and runtime tools aimed at helping users create service oriented architectures (SOAs) involve a heavy dose of non-System i technology, ABL promises Strategi SOA will be a groundbreaking product that helps midrange customers develop an SOA of native System i assets, by System i programmers, and for the benefit of System i shops.

Many System i, iSeries, and AS/400 shops have dug themselves into holes when it comes to the choices they’ve made about the programmers

Qliktech today launched QlikView version 8.0, a new release of its Windows Server-based business intelligence tool used by thousands of customers across the world. With version 8.0, the company has added new “what if” analysis and collaboration capabilities and strived to improve the tool’s scalability and flexibility.

QlikView is an in-memory associative database that QlikTech says provides a more affordable, responsive, and easier-to-use alternative to traditional on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data warehousing applications, which rely on terabytes of spinning disk to store data.

This week at its Qonnections 2007 conference in The Netherlands, QlikTech launched version 8.0 of its

System i change management vendor Aldon, which announced yesterday it was bought by a private equity firm, used last week’s COMMON conference as a forum for its latest product announcement: support for the latest release of IBM‘s WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc).

In March, IBM started shipping WDSc 7.0, which stirred a good bit of controversy among System i shops who felt IBM wasn’t including enough development capacity with the standard version of the tool. For better or for worse, there will undoubtedly be plenty of System i shops upgrading to the new release, which is now the

It’s easier for students at the New York College of Podiatric Medicine to access their AS/400-based financial aid records as a result of an implementation of NetManage OnWeb for iSeries, NetManage announced yesterday.

The New York College of Podiatric Medicine was founded in 1911 and is the oldest and largest podiatric college in the world. The school, which is based in Harlem, New York, has about 400 students. It’s also affiliated with Foot Clinics of New York, which sees approximately 40,000 patient visits a year and is the world’s largest foot care clinic.

Students and administrative personnel at the college

Application development toolmaker mrc has added new SQL capabilities to m-Power, a development tool that works with System i and other Java-compatible servers and databases, the company announced last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California.

The new SQL-related features in M-Power include the capability to join files, and to join and then query the files, according to mrc. The company has also added support for union statements involving multiple databases and support for nested sub-selects, which gives users the power to pick and choose what data to use.

The new custom SQL capabilities in M-Power are primarily targeted

BOSaNOVA rolled out a new edition to its spectrum of thin client offerings last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. The new 310XP BOStablet features a 10-inch TFT touch-screen display and is designed to excel in areas where its 8-inch tablet failed to impress.

With a screen resolution of 1024×768, BOSaNOVA’s new 310XP BOStablet will allow people to view details that they just couldn’t see with the tablets with 8-inch displays, including BOSaNOVA’s 8375 and 8368 Wireless Tablets, which have been available for three years. Screen resolution is particularly critical in the healthcare industry, where doctors and nurses

Applied Logic yesterday unveiled File Edit Utility (FEU) version 15, a new release of the Keizer, Oregon, company’s programmer utility for accessing and modifying i5/OS data.

Modeled after IBM‘s DFU, Applied Logic’s FEU utility offers programmers a slew of functionality, including basic file editing function, the capability to make changes to files en masse based on specified criteria, the capability to edit and reformat spool files, generate DDS, distribute files via FTP, output files in PC formats, and many other capabilities. Obviously such a powerful tool needs security safeguards, and FEU has them in the form of role-based access,