It can be tough to stand out in the crowded market for integrated development environment (IDE) tools. With Eclipse and Visual Studio dominating the IDE conversation, companies like Artech must work hard to maintain their established customers and market niches, let alone grow business. With last month’s launch of Genexus X Evolution 1, which re-introduces RPG generators and includes many other features aimed at Web 2.0 enablement, the company believes it’s positioned well to grow along with its customers.

Artech is not your standard development tool maker. Based in Montevideo, Uruguay, the company has labored over the past few years

Zend Technologies is bringing another PHP product to the System i. With last week’s announcement of the start of beta testing for Zend Server 5.0, the company announced that Zend Server will be supported, for the first time, on i OS. The addition will bring what Zend calls the “most complete stack” of PHP software to the platform, and will give System i developers options beyond Zend’s existing tools.

Zend has been a strong supporter of the System i server ever since the relationship between i OS and the open-source, server-side scripting language began way back in 2005. To

IBM last week unveiled the version 7 release of Host Access Client Package, the pair of emulator products that give customers the choice of accessing i OS, z/OS, and Unix applications from either a traditional Windows-based emulator (Personal Communications) or a Web-based emulator (Rational Host On-Demand). Enhancements delivered with the new version include support for Windows 7, SSL-enabled FTP, new sign-on options for i OS, a text editor, and a range of other changes.

There is no shortage of options when it comes to IBM emulators. System i shops that need the full gamut of capabilities will more often than

IBM filled a small gap in its high availability (HA) product lineup last week with the introduction of HA Assist for i. The new offering is a logical replication solution designed to keep certain objects, such as S/36 objects, in synch between production and backup boxes. It’s designed to be used by existing users of IBM’s hardware-based HA offering, PowerHA, and is not a generalized logical replication software offering.

PowerHA is the new name IBM uses to refer to its shared storage clustering solution. The PowerHA offering enables fast failovers or role swaps thanks to its architecture, in which the

Storage giant Quantum last week launched a new line of data de-duplication appliances called the DXi6500. Based on the same core technology as its enterprise-level DXi7500 series, the new family of appliances is aimed at medium sized organizations that don’t need the extensive configurability of more complicated disk-based backup appliances, and instead are looking for a “set it and forget it” storage solution, company officials say.

Quantum will start shipping the first two members of the DXi6500 family in November. This includes the DXi6510, which offers a fixed 8 TB of usable disk, and the DXi6520, which scales from 8

Better business decisions are in the forecast for Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, a Southern California college that recently implemented the Smart i Appliance, which is based on IBM‘s DB2 Web Query. A key element of the System i-based business intelligence solution is Talend‘s Integration Suite, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool that was updated last week to include change data capture for DB2/400, among other new features.

Several years ago, Talend set out to prove that the commercial open source development model can work for ETL tools. After all, the business model was proving successful

Companies that rely on i OS address verification software from WorksRight Software can rest assured that they can continue to use the software into the new year–and get bulk-mailer discounts from the US Postal Service–as the result of USPS certification of WorkRight’s PER/ZIP4, announced last week.

PER/ZIP4 is a batch-oriented i OS software product that analyzes address files and automatically fixes them to adhere to standards. At the same time, the software can also cross check the address to assign a five-digit ZIP code, and can even add four-digit ZIP code extensions. It can also be used interactively to provide

SafeData yesterday unveiled SafeData Vault, a new appliance designed to back up and restore data to and from System i and Windows servers. In addition to storing the backups locally, the new device sends backups across the Internet to SafeData’s data center, providing customers with an off-site backup that can be used in the event of a disaster.

SafeData is no stranger to disaster recovery and high availability services. The Warwick, Rhode Island, company began courting iSeries shops with hosted DR in 2005, when its principal, Peter Briggs, established SafeData after serving for a time as a Lakeview Technology business

IBM last week announced a new release of Host Integration Solution (HIS), the amalgamation of various programming tools for modernizing and accessing applications running on IBM i OS, among other platforms. With HIS version 7.6, IBM has updated the package with the most current releases of its various components, some of which were also announced last week.

HIS is a sprawling suite of products (actually, two suites of products) that IBM put together to serve the needs of large organizations that need Telnet access to a variety of hosts, along with modernization tools to enable the modernization to Web-based GUI

Thin client distributor 10ZiG Technology (formerly BOSaNOVA) recently introduced a novel utility that makes it easier to manage dual-monitor setups. Called the Dual Monitor Utility, the software delivers helpful features that allow dual-monitor users to overcome some of the common headaches of managing two monitors connected to the same thin client CPU.

The availability of cheap and plentiful LCD screens has sparked a bit of a real-estate boom on the desks of millions of office workers around the globe. Workers were once able to get by with a single, bulky 15-inch CRT screen on their desks. But no longer.

Today,