The folks at VACAVA are, you might say, System i bigots. For those who are familiar with the IBM System i server, which is designed and manufactured in Rochester, Minnesota, where VACAVA is also based, that is a good thing. Now the former IBMers at VACAVA are gearing up to launch a new application, for System i shops that run call centers, called Customer Care.

VACAVA was founded about 10 years ago by Terry Bird, the company’s owner and president. Over the years, Bird attracted several of his colleagues away from Big Blue and into VACAVA’s sphere, including Jim Kelly,

Lakeview Technology is using the bad i5/OS high availability experience of a Nevada casino to tout its own product, MIMIX, and rub dirt in the face of its longtime competitor, Vision Solutions, which now owns and sells the popular Echo2 high availability software. As the story unfolds, it will become apparent that high availability industry still has a ways to go on two fronts: making HA software more automatic and self-managing, and separating HA fact from fiction.

Black Gaming Operations is a hotel and casino business based in Mesquite, Nevada, about 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The company

Thousands of gallons of punch have cascaded down the fountain since ERP made its debut in the 1990s, and people have figured out how to make some ERP products work without the aid of a platoon of well-compensated experts. The key to having your ERP cake and eating it from a beautifully decorated disposable plate, it seems, is understanding your requirements in detail, having a plan to get everyone in your organization from the CEO on down to buy into the project, and finding a system that snugly fits your business objectives.

ERP has had a magnetic appeal with manufacturers

ProData Computer Services has released a version of its Database Utility (DBU) that can access other relational database management systems in addition to DB2/400. With the new capability, available from ProData as a plug-in called DBU Remote Database (RDB), System i programmers can now get the same high-powered, real-time access to SQL Server, DB2 UDB, Oracle, MySQL, and other database as DBU customers have realized when accessing DB2/400.

DBU is a popular and handy utility that makes it easy for programmers, administrators, and users to view and access any file in DB2/400, without programming. The software, which was

CollabNet, the open-source software company behind the Subversion change management solution, has snapped up two former SoftLanding Systems programmers, including Mark Phippard, former director of development, and Paul Burba, who worked on the port of Subversion to OS/400.

Numerous employees of SoftLanding Systems have left the company or been fired following the acquisition by Unicom Systems in November. Some of these people have hired on at other change management vendors, notably Arcad Software, the French software company that is making a big push to capture a share of North American market for i5/OS change management tools, and which

Raz-Lee Security is shipping a new release of iSecurity, its suite of security tools for System i servers. Improvements that users will see with the new release include a new graphical interface, new reporting and report distribution capabilities, and a new user authentication system.

Raz-Lee’s iSecurity suite is composed of more than a dozen products that can be purchased individually or as an integrated package. The products include Firewall, Antivirus, Screen, Password Manager, Audit, Action, Capture, View, Visualizer, FileScope, Application Journal, User Profile Manager, and the Assessment tool.

In April, Raz-Lee announced what it billed as a major a new

SoftTree Technologies has added support for the MySQL database with DB Audit Expert, its database audit tool that it now can claim supports every other major database, including DB2/400.

DB Audit Expert is an affordable tool that administrators and auditors can use to track and analyze all database activity, including any access, use, adds, changes, or deletion. The product is particularly useful for proving compliance to the laundry list of regulations affecting IT: SOX, GLBA, HIPAA, BASEL II, et al.

Up to this point, the product has worked with all major database management systems–DB2/400, DB2 UDB, SQL Server, Oracle,

Now that IBM has chosen it as the basis for its System i business intelligence offering, Information Builders is ramping up its sales and marketing efforts for WebFOCUS, the Java-based reporting tool that will replace Query/400 and that IBM will resell as DB2 Web Query for System i.

Last week, Info Builders announced several new “midmarket” customers have adopted WebFOCUS, including the Hillman Group, Star Lumber, ABC Financial, and Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS). While the company didn’t say specifically that these customers will run WebFOCUS on System i, the fact is that at least two of them–Hillman Group and Star

Elite Document Solutions, the document management software developer that was recently acquired by Vanguard Systems, the developer of the IMS21 imaging system, has added credit card processing to its recently introduced signature capture offering.

Last year, Elite rolled out Electronic Signature Capture, a piece of software that enables employees to capture signatures with each order, and to have the signature stored alongside other pertinent documents in Elite’s document management and archive system. The signature offering works in both mobile and local environments, and is particularly useful as a way of proving a delivery was made.

According to Elite,

IBM said yesterday that more than 4,500 of its customers have modeled their businesses around service oriented architecture (SOA), the latest sign that SOA is having a big impact in business IT. The revelation was made at its inaugural IMPACT 2007 conference being held this week in Orlando, Florida, where Big Blue stepped up its SOA drum-beating with an assortment of new certification, training, partnership, and marketing programs concerning “T-shaped” skills.

According to Steve Mills, head of IBM Software, SOA is having a real-world impact on businesses, as well as IBM’s bottom-line. “SOA has been a growth engine for IBM