• Jamaican Home Improvement Store Selects VAI

  July 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A $100 million per year Jamaican business has installed an i OS-based ERP suite from VAI on which to standardize its operations. Hardware & Lumber, which is a subsidiary of Jamaica’s largest conglomerate, GraceKennedy & Company Limited, selected S2K Enterprise to replace three disparate systems that were outdated. From its headquarters in Kingston, H&L sells a variety of products through its 14 retail locations, including building materials, home improvement supplies, household items, and agricultural products, to consumers and other retailers. The company, which also functions as a distributor, handles 80,000 SKUs, and employs 650 people. Yvette Johnson, chief information officer,

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• Drummond Certifies Five Products for AS1 Interop

  July 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Five B2B software products from three vendors have passed the most recent tests by Drummond Group for interoperability using the AS1 protocol. Companies sending and receiving EDI data over e-mail using AS1 can rest assured that products from Axway, Inovis, and nuBridges are certified for compatibility. Drummond Group conducts nearly a dozen tests a year to ensure B2B software vendors’ products don’t muck up the payload during transmission via various protocols, including AS1, AS2, AS3, ebXML, RosettaNet, and GDSN (global data synchronization network). Software vendors pay Drummond to test and certify their software, and supply chain participants use

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• Magic Taps New Era for Reseller Partnership

  July 8, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Magic Software Enterprises, a provider of application development and integration solutions for the IBM i OS platform, last week announced the formation of a reseller partnership with New Era Solutions Consulting, a systems integrator based in New York City. As part of the partnership, New Era will sell and support Magic’s eDeveloper application platform, as well as its iBOLT business integration suite. Previously, New Era offered consulting services utilizing Magic’s technology. “Adding Magic Software’s entire product suite to our offering really strengthens our solutions overall to our customers,” says Mayer Schmukler, New Era’s president. “Our decision to increase

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• The Power Systems 550 M50 Versus Its Predecessors

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM said that it was mostly concerned with preserving the price points of its i-class machinery as it made the transition from the System i to Power Systems i Editions, the company wasn’t kidding. With the user-priced entry Power 520 M15 and M25 editions, customers are seeing some price/performance improvements, but with the larger Power 550 M50 machine, the bang for the buck is not appreciably different from its predecessor System i 550 boxes. You can debate for yourself whether or not this matters all that much, but I think it does matter. With every successive generation of systems

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• IBM Rejiggers Development Tools on Entry Power 520 i Editions

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  At the prices that IBM has historically charged for the AS/400 and its successor systems, you’d think that the compilers and related application development tools would just come as part of the system, much as the DB2/400 database did–and still does in the most recent DB2 for i incarnation inside the i 6.1 operating system. But, when Software Group was created more than a decade ago, the former system product groups started losing control of the software stacks that ran on their systems–that were for all intents and purposes the systems. That is why the i platform has been

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• Job Word Cloud Redux: The AS/400 Sees Some Improvement

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, in a story entitled Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs, I gathered up some job posting data from three of the big job sites in the United States–Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster–as jobs related to programming languages and operating system platforms. Some readers offered me some suggestions for improving my searches, and I requeried the data to see what effect those suggestions had. As it turns out, using a simple “AS400” query with no slash mark does indeed find a few more jobs on some of the sites

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• As I See It: The Digital Leader

  July 7, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Remote management, like remote viewing, is a specialized skill with a small practitioner base and an even smaller number of players who can actually do it successfully. Leading a tightly knit group of people, all of whom work in the same facility–and with whom you can directly interact–is one thing. Leading groups in a distributed world, where people are separated by continents and cultures, and with whom you have no personal contact, is quite another. And although management schools and how-to theories abound, there is really no place to learn the complexities of managing people who aren’t there. So what’s

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• WebSphere Portal Remains the Industry Leader, Says Gartner

  July 7, 2008 Dan Burger

  Now that the enterprise portal market has topped $1 billion, it seems as though the momentum is building and substantial changes are taking place with regard to the acceptance of this technology and the development of the skills required to make it fly. What hasn’t changed is IBM‘s position as the top vendor in the portal server field. That position, however, is being challenged in the wake of database and application giant Oracle‘s acquisition of BEA Systems. Based on the calculations of the license counters at Gartner, IBM’s WebSphere Portal remains the revenue-generating leader for sales figures

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• Big Blue’s Power Systems Painted Green at OCEAN Tech Conference

  July 7, 2008 Dan Burger

  Energy inefficiencies and their rapidly escalating costs are being swept under the rug at most companies. Not intentionally, but as part of a routine that avoids taking a hard look at reducing these substantial costs. In the data center, real energy efficiencies are leading to considerable savings. That was the message Jeff Howard, director of Power Systems offerings at IBM, shared with attendees at the annual OCEAN midrange user group technical conference last week in Irvine, California. Where should IT managers look for energy abuse? X64 servers took a lot of the heat that Howard was dishing out. Utilization

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• The Relational Database Market Grows Decently in 2007

  July 7, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are halfway through 2008, and only now is IDC coming out with its sales statistics for the relational database management system (RDBMS) market in 2007. But estimating database sales takes a whole lot more effort than counting up servers and calculating revenues by vendor, and it takes both IDC and Gartner to gin up statistics that they think accurately reflect what actually happened in the market. Hence, the lag. According to the figures released last week from IDC, the relational database market grew by 12.6 percent in 2007, hitting $18.8 billion in sales–a pretty hefty bump up from

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