3B Dataservices, an IBM business partner in Eastern Canada, is stirring up the ERP pot these days by claiming that its software for enterprise application for small and mid size businesses in the light manufacturing, distribution, and construction industries, called iNfinite Answers, is the world’s first “unERP” application. So what makes an unERP? According to the folks at 3B Dataservices, it’s all about radically simplifying the database design.

According to Rob Bunn, a principle at 3B Dataservices, the company started designing the framework for iNfinite Answers more than 15 years ago with the goal of eliminating elements that traditionally

Plodding through lengthy printed reports to find specific performance metrics is a leading cause of frustration in many of today’s IBM System i-based business environments. Thumbing through a five-pound green-bar paper report to find bits and pieces of data based on day-old information is the equivalent of walking behind a mule to plow your field. A reporting system based on dashboards created for specific management-level users featuring information updated and displayed every five seconds is not only possible, it’s affordable.

Key City Furniture manufactures build-to-order products that are sold through hundreds of retail furniture outlets. With more than 150 employees

What can you expect to get with an i OS high availability software offering that costs between $10,000 and $15,000? With last week’s release of Bug Busters Software Engineering‘s Remote Software Facility-HA, you can expect to find new features like a source-to-target compare feature, new archive and refresh functions, and a check-point reset feature for restarting interrupted role swaps. These come on top of core HA features that are leading some System i shops to consider RSF-HA for their HA and DR needs.

Bug Busters has been continually adding new features to RSF-HA over the past three years since

Crossroads Systems last week took the covers off SPHiNX for Power Systems, a new virtual tape library (VTL) offering designed for IBM Power Systems running i OS. The SPHiNX lineup is largely based on the company’s preexisting lineup of Virtual TapeServer (VTS) products, but features some changes in product packaging and lower pricing, in addition to the name change. The announcement was made at the COMMON show in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Crossroads Systems is an accomplished storage technology vendor based in Austin, Texas, that’s looking to grab its share of the growing market for VTL solutions. Earlier this year, we covered

Remote journaling. XSM. Logical replication. iASPs. Disk-based mirroring. If one thing is certain, it’s that there is no shortage of options for disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) on the IBM Power Systems server. Thankfully, there are experts that can guide you through this technological maze, including the folks at Vision Solutions, who recently published a well-written white paper that takes an in-depth look at the wide spectrum of DR HA options for i OS and AIX environments.

In the new white paper, titled “Next-Generation Disaster Recovery and Availability Technologies for IBM Power Systems,” Vision Solutions takes on

HiT Software this month started a beta test program for Ritmo Mobile, a new data provider designed to connect .NET mobile applications running on a smart phone or PDA to access data residing on DB2 databases, including DB2/400.

Ritmo is a development tool that integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio environments to help developers build high-speed data connections between .NET applications and DB2 databases, including DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (DB2 Louise), and its older brother, DB2 for i (DB2/400).

Ritmo includes a C# toolkit that plugs into the developer’s IDE, and enables them to do all sorts of things,

Help/Systems last week announced that Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, its i OS-based job scheduling software, can now manage the workloads of servers running the HP-UX flavor of Unix from Hewlett-Packard. The announcement gives Help/Systems complete coverage of Unix, Linux, and Windows computing platforms with its enterprise job scheduler.

Help/Systems announced Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise earlier this year to extend the coverage of its i OS-based job scheduling software to its customers’ other servers. The software, which is sold as an option to its core Robot/SCHEDULE product, includes Java-based agents that deploy to the target platforms and enable two-way communication with the job scheduler

If your company runs its business applications on an IBM Power System i server, chances are good that it also uses the Backup, Recovery, Media Services (BRMS) utility that comes with the IBM i OS operating system. Now, with the latest release of the QSystem Monitor systems management tool from i OS software vendor CCSS, your administrators can keep a closer watch on BRMS activities, and get notifications more quickly when something is about to go horribly wrong.

QSystem Monitor (QSM) helps System i administrators keep better track of their servers by automating the collection of error messages and

System i and System z users were given another option for test automation this month when BlueZone Software inked a partnership deal with software testing specialist SmarteSoft to include its 5250 and 3270 emulators in SmarteSoft’s testing software.

As part of the deal, BlueZone, which is a subsidiary of Rocket Software, will allow its terminal emulators to be packaged and sold with SmarteScript and SmarteX, SmarteSoft’s collection of automated application testing. The integration means SmarteScript and SmarteX users will be able to test applications that run on i OS and z/OS, the vendors say.

Despite its name, SmarteScript does

Two i OS security vendors that have seen leadership changes in the last couple of months, Patrick Townsend Security Solutions (PTSS) and PowerTech, recently announced a partnership that will see PowerTech reselling PTSS’s Alliance line of AES encryption software for the i OS server.

The security industry has seen a big boost lately in the form of the Payment Cardholder Industry Data Security Standard (PCI). One of the requirements of the PCI DSS is to implement strong encryption for credit card data, which is what many retailers are still scrambling to do to avoid paying big fines to the