When you think of IBM, it’s safe to say that software isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. The company’s very name, International Business Machines, conjures images of big honking servers toiling away in a darkened room, processing billions of transactions for the world’s largest companies. But with every successive quarter, IBM becomes more of a software vendor than a hardware maker. As a demonstration of its new business content collaboration software, Lotus Quickr, shows, the company is surprisingly hip to the latest Web 2.0 thing.

Lotus Quickr is a new product designed to allow business users

You have probably witnessed the problem: terabytes of unstructured data, in the form of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PDFs, and image files, piling up on Windows servers, IFS servers, and file shares. Microsoft made it easy to store and share these files, but it failed to create an automated method for controlling access to these files. That’s not good when the files contain sensitive data like social security numbers. So Varonis developed a product that gives employees access only to the data they need to do their jobs.

According to the IT analyst firm IDC, unstructured data accounts for

CA this week will officially unveil a new version of CA Plex (formerly AllFusion Plex), its model-based application development environment for System i, Windows, and Unix environments, that supports the generation of Microsoft C# server code. The company is also shipping a new service pack for CA 2E (formerly AllFusion 2E), the fourth-generation language popular among midrange System i (formerly iSeries and AS/400) customers and, which, like CA Plex, traces its roots back to the Synon days.

2E and Plex are the direct descendents the Synon/2E 4GL and the Obsydian reusable-template development tools, created by Simon Williams and his developers

The recent implementation of Infor‘s SupplyWEB supplier relationship management (SRM) software at Hitachi Automotive Products should have a big impact on how Hitachi communicates with its suppliers, particularly when it comes to its smaller vendors that can’t justify the expense of installing and running their own EDI system. With a hosted solution based on SupplyWEB, suppliers now need only a Web browser to link to Hitachi.

Hitachi Automotive Products (HAP) is a division of the Japanese industrial giant Hitachi that manufactures electronic, mechanical, and electro-mechanical powertrain components, such as starters, alternators, inverters for electric vehicles, fuel injectors, sensors, and

Business Computer Design Int’l (BCD) last week released a beta of WebSmart ILE version 6.5, an update to its integrated development environment for the System i. WebSmart ILE 6.5 is based on the same underlying architecture as WebSmart PHP, which BCD announced in May and which is also undergoing beta tests. Both IDEs are expected to ship by the end of September.

WebSmart ILE is a development tool used for building CGI-based Web applications that compile as native System i objects and execute on the System i’s built-in HTTP Server (the one “powered by Apache, of course). It is

ASNA, a developer of .NET-based development tools and compilers for RPG programmers, is now providing System i application modernization and migrations services through its newly formed ASNA Services Group, the San Antonio, Texas, company announced this month.

ASNA will provide a range of services under its new ASNA Services Group, including: development of Windows, Web, and Web services for extending legacy System i applications; design, architecture, and implementation of Microsoft .NET applications; complete or partial migration of i5/OS applications to Microsoft .NET using its Monarch migration tool; and conversion of DB2/400 databases to Microsoft SQL Server.

ASNA, which is

Systems administrators who like to check on their servers while on the go may be interested in the latest release of the Mobile SSH terminal emulation product from Idokorro Mobile. With Mobile SSH version 3.1, the Ottawa software company is now supporting Bluetooth network connections.

Mobile SSH is a diminutive terminal emulator designed to run on smart phones and wireless handheld devices. The software offers full support for the 5250, 3270, and VT100 terminal emulation protocols, enabling users to access i5/OS, z/OS, Unix, Linux, and Netware servers, as well as network gear such as routers and switches, from the

Elica, an Italian company that has built a reputation for making some of the world’s most desirable cooking hoods, has selected integration specialist TIBCO Software to provide the products that will form the backbone of a new service oriented architecture (SOA) residing on top of existing systems, including OS/400-based ERP systems.

With sales of more than 5 million cooking hoods per year, Elica Group, which was formed in the 1970s, has become the predominant manufacturer of cooking hoods in much of Europe. A recent string of acquisitions has challenged the company’s IT department and its ability to integrate disparate systems,

Rippe & Kingston Launches Contract Management Software

Rippe & Kingston recently launched e.ssential Contract Guardian, a new contract management application that runs on the System i, among other platforms, and can help eliminate the reliance on paper for the handling of contracts.

Contracts are notorious for generating copious amounts of paper. Keeping the lawyers out of the process might save a forest-worth of trees, but then again, that could lead to another paper-intensive process: filing and defending lawsuits.

To keep all parties happy, Rippe & Kingston, a product development and consulting shop that specializes in LANSA tools, launched last month

Ricoh Americas last week launched two new wide-format multi-function printers (MFPs), the Aficio MP W2400 and MP W3600, both of which can work with the System i server.

The new W2400 and W3600 printers both are designed to print high quality black and white documents at up to 600 dpi resolution. They aren’t terribly fast, with print speeds of two and three pages per minute, respectively. But they do offer the capability to scan, copy, distribute, and archive, making them much more than basic printers.

What really sets the new printers apart, though, are their support for printing and copying