It can be a very tough business competing in the global i5/OS high availability software market. One company that’s learned some lessons is Maximum Availability, which launched its *noMAX product around the turn of the millennium. While the New Zealand company initially intended to wage an air war by relying on the Internet to sell, service, and support its product, it’s increasingly finding that nothing beats boots on the ground. The company’s vice president of marketing and sales, Andrew Mansfield, recently discussed the company’s changes with IT Jungle.

Maximum Availability never fully expected to rely on its Web

One can never be too rich, too thin, or too young, as an old saying goes. When it comes to systems management tools for the i5/OS server, perhaps one can never have too many ways to interact with and control the server. One vendor embracing this concept is Software Engineering of America, a developer of tools for System i and System z servers, which recently introduced two new interfaces for absMessage, its message management utility for i5/OS servers, bringing the total number of product interfaces to four.

SEA is a relative newbie to the System i systems management space,

Aldon simultaneously strengthened and streamlined the authentication process for its change management tools last month with the introduction of a new identity access management (IAM) component. By automatically tracking which objects a given person can access and what they can do with them, the new IAM component should make life easier for Aldon’s customers, as well as the auditors trying to gauge their compliance.

Change management software, by its very nature, is very process oriented. It’s also generally at least somewhat aware of its users’ identities. After all, no change management product that’s correctly configured would allow a disgruntled former

Users don’t have to worry about missing incoming fax orders during hectic workdays thanks to the new “dynamic line allocation” feature in FastFax/Enterprise version 4.7.2, which was announced this week by Quadrant Software. With dynamic line allocation, FastFax/Enterprise automatically takes fax lines normally assigned for outgoing faxes and uses them for incoming faxes.

FastFax/Enterprise is an enterprise-grade fax server software product designed to integrate with i5/OS ERP systems, such as J.D. Edwards and BPCS. The software offers users the capability to send documents generated by their ERP system as faxes or as e-mail, and to do so from the

HiT Software last week unveiled a new version of Ritmo/i5, its data provider product connecting Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to DB2/400. With Ritmo/i5 version 4, HiT is providing support for Visual Studio developers using the latest ADO.NET 2.0 techniques to pull data from their System i database into their Windows applications. The result is the “smoothest” integration between System i and Microsoft’s development tools yet, HiT says.

ADO.NET 2.0 debuted in late 2005 with the release of the .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005. Version 2.0 implemented a base-class provider model that brings a number of

Lawson Software last week unveiled Lawson QuickStep Enterprise Asset Management, a new offering based on its M3 (formerly Movex) suite that arrives mostly preconfigured by Lawson, which can cut the implementation by up to 50 percent compared to traditional EAM applications.

The EAM application category is relied upon by organizations that make use of mechanical assets, including trucks, busses, cars, planes, trains, heating and air conditioning, and building equipment. Because capturing and tracking information about these types of assets can be a tricky business, organizations rely on this cousin of ERP to do the job for them, while generating all

Replacing a merchandise management system (MMS) and point of sale (POS) system that was prone to error and cumbersome to work with has led the world’s largest DVD retailer to Alpha Retail Technology, and its MMS and POS software. The new software integrates with an iSeries server, which manage financial, catalog inventory, and other business applications.

Infinity Resources, the parent company of the DVD retailer DVDPlanet, made its software search contingent on a product that could manage cyclical trends and replenishment profiles based on factors associated with each title, such as release date and seasonal demands. It required the

A fundamental change in licensing has put NetManage customers on the road to royalty-free source code used for transforming legacy applications to Web-based applications. According to a NetManage announcement, the company is offering direct access to the code used in its Librados Adapters without the charges previously associated with this product.

Librados was designed to expose the functionality and data of backend systems for integration with application servers, Web servers, or stand-alone environments. Like other application modernization products its purpose is to convert enterprise applications to Web applications while integrating business processes from other enterprise information systems. The key is

Stonesoft today announced a new release of StoneGate Management Center (SMC), a Linux-based management console used to manage and control Stonesoft’s point security solutions. With SMC version 4, Stonesoft has added new replication features that boost the product’s capability to function during a disaster.

Stonesoft, you might recall, was the only security vendor interested in developing a firewall solution for the iSeries following IBM‘s removal of OS/400’s firewall product several years ago. The Finish company prefers to develop (not surprisingly) in Linux, but just the same, it has obtained some valuable knowledge of the importance of protecting data on

AMR Research last week published its annual list of the 25 manufacturers and retailers with the strongest supply chain organizations. Considering the fact that many System i shops deal directly or are otherwise affected by these supply chain readers–not to mention that a fair number of the companies on the list are known System i shops themselves–it may be worth your while to check out the list and see who the best in the field are.

AMR Research uses a strict but simple methodology to ascertain the 25 best supply chain organizations in the world for 2006. The analyst group