Zend Technologies and BCD have been working together for about three years to help IBM i shops adopt PHP for developing new applications. Under a new partnership agreement unveiled recently, Zend will be referring customers to BCD for custom PHP-on-IBM i development work. But that’s not all the two vendors have up their respective sleeves.

After analyzing the existing relationship between Zend and BCD, executives with the companies realized that a regular reseller model was not going to cut it, says Jeff Lovette, vice president of global sales and channels for Quadrant Software, which acquired BCD last year.

“What

Data aggregation, for many organizations, is more like data aggravation. Automating data consolidation from multiple files, even those that exist in different systems in different locations, has proved to be problematic, especially for businesses that run from multiple sites. When updating and aggregating data becomes a bottleneck, IT managers start searching for answers. Double the frustration when the distribution of data from one file to multiple files is also a factor.

Solving those issues was a priority for Cilasoft, a security and compliance software vendor with a long history in the IBM midrange market. Last week, Cilasoft unveiled CENTRAL

The issue of whether to support independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) in your IBM i setup is not one to be taken lightly. For starters, just migrating from traditional ASPs to iASPs can be a major project, and your software will need to be tweaked to support it. While IBM i shops are moving to adopt iASPs, the growth is slow and steady rather than a mad dash. But for SoftLanding Systems, demand for iASPs was enough to justify modifying its change management tool, Turnover, to support the technology.

iASPs debuted with the platform way back in 2001 with

IBM i shops are up in arms this week over the huge performance increases that IBM is seeking to foist upon them with the latest Power8 servers. “Eight threads per core and 12 cores per socket? Really IBM?” said clearly exasperated programmer/analyst Jack D. Sparrow. “I mean, what on earth am I going to do with all that raw, unbridled processing power?”

Sparrow is not alone. In fact, a growing number of IBM i professionals are beginning to vocalize concerns about IBM and its sinister plan to equip every customer with a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower that will

One of the biggest challenges in setting up a virtual fax over IP (FoIP) system is getting the telephony settings right. Screw up one of the dozens of settings in a typical install, and you’ll quickly be on the phone to tech support. With a new release of Quadrant Software‘s QuadraDocV FoIP software, the vendor added a graphical wizard that significantly simplifies the setup process.

Quadrant launched QuadraDocV two years ago to provide a virtual FoIP solution, primarily for its large base of existing IBM i customers. As a replacement for its popular FastFax “black box” appliances, QuadraDocV installs