When you look at how the market for ERP software has changed over the past few years, the rapid consolidation of ERP software companies into a handful of giants is perhaps what stands out the most. But not all ERP software companies are interested in the consolidation game and the big payoffs they can bring to their owners. VAI, for one, is content with the steady growth that comes from attracting new customers, listening to their problems, and developing solutions for them.

VAI (which stands for Vormittag Associates Inc.) has a long history on the IBM midrange platform. Founded

SteelEye Technology, a developer of high availability software for Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems, has teamed up with i5/OS high availability specialists Vision Solutions to sell cross-platform high availability solutions that protect virtualized Linux and AIX servers on iSeries servers.

One of the hallmarks of IBM‘s i5/OS server platform is its agility in supporting a variety of server operating environments, and the flexibility to run nearly any application that this brings to its users. Linux and AIX can run natively as guest logical partitions on the System i’s 64-bit Power5 processors, while Windows is relegated to PCI-based

nCipher, an English provider of encryption solutions, last week announced that its encryption key management software, called keyAuthority, now supports the i5/OS server. The new capability is the result of collaboration with i5/OS encryption expert Patrick Townsend & Associates, and the primary benefit is allowing System i shops to manage and maintain cryptography keys for local and remote i5/OS servers in the same place that keys for other platforms are managed.

In the olden days, electronic encryption was primarily the residence of banks and government organizations that required a high degree of data security, says Richard Mould, nCipher’s

Business Objects last week announced a pair of business intelligence packages assembled specifically for J.D. Edwards customers, including the QuickStart for J.D. Edwards, which it developed with Andrews Consulting Group, and BI Quick Launch for J.D. Edwards, which was developed with Preferred Strategies. Both solutions are designed to get World and EnterpriseOne quickly up and running with business intelligence solutions, and both make extensive use of BO’s Crystal Reports software.

Last week was an active one for J.D. Edwards business intelligence solutions. The big news was the announcement by Oracle that it plans to buy Hyperion. It

Original Software last week formally announced its new product, first revealed in December, that helps companies implement software testing that fits their current development strategies without requiring disruptive wholesale changes.

TestDrive-Assist, as the product formally announced last week is known, is a component of Original’s TestDrive suite that’s intended to allow customers to ease into automated software testing, as opposed to diving right in, which Original calls its “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach.

In short, TestDrive-Assist enables users to manually test their software and include the results of those tests in Original’s test tracking system. Now, audit trails resulting from all

Design Systems last week introduced Payment Courier 2.0, a new version of its i5/OS-based payment processing software that supports “card-present” transactions and credit card swipers.

Payment Courier was introduced last year primarily as a replacement for manual payment processes. Instead of requiring customer service representatives to walk over to keypad devices and manually type in a credit card number, they could initialize and complete a transaction from Payment Courier, which features a 5250 green screen, as well as APIs for integrating with RPG applications.

Design Systems developed Payment Courier, using LANSA development tools, for card-not-present transactions, as you would expect

Shield Advanced Solutions last week unveiled enhancements to JobQGenie, an i5/OS utility that replicates and correlates job queue data to improve the recoverability of iSeries systems during a high availability failover. It also announced a new subscription-based pricing scheme.

IBM and the i5/OS high availability software developers have done a good job writing software that replicates data and objects with a high degree of certitude, according to Shield Advanced Solutions, a company based near Toronto, Ontario.

However, there’s one area that traditional high availability solutions did not address, and that’s the problem of job-to-data correlation across replicated systems. JobQGenie helps

iSeries modernization experts Seagull Software is partnering with IT giant Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation to enable Seagull’s LegaSuite customers to park their Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) applications in CentraSite, a vendor-neutral SOA registry and repository co-developed by Fujitsu and Software AG, the companies announced last week.

CentraSite was launched by Fujitsu and Software AG about a year-and-a-half ago as an open foundation for managing and governing SOA projects. CentraSite provides a central repository for SOA “artifacts” created by the various people involved, including “roles” like architects, process modelers, and developers. These role player can use CentraSite

Sheetz, a $3.8 billion chain of convenience stores on the East Coast, has deployed Stampede‘s Application Acceleration Series to boost the speed of its WebSphere Portal applications.

Founded in 1952, Sheetz operates 329 stores in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina, and employs 11,000. The company–one of the pioneers of the “convenience restaurant” format–is growing fast, having made the Forbes list of top 100 biggest privately held companies the last few years.

To support this growth, the company has turned to innovative uses of technology. As such it was one of the first companies to use

Thinking of migrating your RPG applications to .NET? Then you may be interested in a new offering announced yesterday by CS Group Transoft, which has inked a distribution deal bringing a new RPG-to-.NET conversion tool to the U.S. and the U.K.

CS Group Transoft, the new name given to Transoft following the Atlanta, Georgia, company’s acquisition by Computer Software Group in September 2005, is no stranger to iSeries migrations. The company has been involved in many iSeries migrations, and recently joined Microsoft ‘s Midrange Alliance Program to solidify its place in the cottage industry.

Now, the Transoft organization has