• Professionally Speaking, Lotus Users Getting Better Connected

  June 17, 2008 Dan Burger

  Building on its strength of integrating Web-based business applications with Web 2.0 capabilities popular in social networking Web sites, IBM Lotus last week introduced a new version of its collaboration software called Connections 2.0. Among the new capabilities is an impressive user interface with greater functionality and a broader range of social services. IBM continues the open standards drum beat. This time REST and Atom are highlighted as important contrasts to similar proprietary offerings from Microsoft. “We see a lot of customers who want to get value from applications they are already using whether it is Excel or their

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• InfoPrint Solutions Introduces New Printers, AFP Options

  June 17, 2008 Alex Woodie

  The InfoPrint Solutions Company launched two new entry-level monochrome laser printers at the DRUPA printing conference last week in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company also highlighted enhancements for its InfoPrint 4100 industrial-strength printer. The new InfoPrint 75 and InfoPrint 100 continuous forms laser printers offer speeds of 115 pages per minute (PPM) and 154 PPM, respectively, and support print quality up to 600 dots per inch. The two printers support both PostScript and PCL data languages. Support for Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) is planned for 2009. InfoPrint Solutions says the InfoPrint 75 and 100 are ideal entry-level printers for companies

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• iSeries-to-Windows Conversion Successful at Admiral Beverage

  June 17, 2008 Alex Woodie

  When Admiral Beverage migrated its JD Edwards software from the iSeries to a Windows-based xSeries solution, it was left in a quandary over what to do with its ACOM Solutions document and payment management software, which also ran on the OS/400 server. The solution? Admiral found that the Windows versions of ACOM’s software ran just as well as the OS/400 version. Admiral Beverage is a Pepsi distributor that was founded in Wyoming in 1947. Since then, the company has grown tremendously, and now employs more than 1,200 people in 30 facilities across seven states. An iSeries-based JD Edwards ERP solution

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• LANSA Touts Eight RAMP Successes

  June 17, 2008 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is lifting the veil on the recent success it’s had helping customers to modernize their System i applications using its RAMP offering. The customers include Cinram UK, a division of the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of prerecorded entertainment media, which modernized its System i-based application into a Web-based portal that looked more like a Windows-based SAP application. CHS, a Fortune 200 company that supplies grain, food, and energy products from its headquarters in Minnesota, used RAMP to upgrade a legacy COBOL application, and enjoyed a 25 percent productivity improvement by streamlining the customer service system. DEMCO, which supplies

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• Happy 20th Birthday, AS/400!

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, and probably into next, IBM, its partners, and its customers will be celebrating the 20th birthday for the AS/400 system, which came to market on June 21, 1988. It has been an incredible–and sometimes unbelievable–two decades for the venerable OS/400 platform, whose roots go back a decade earlier to the System/38, the first integrated system in the world with a relational database and easy-to-use programming language designed for people who speak business, not assembler or C or some other alien computer language. I am not sure how much celebrating Big Blue will be doing, particularly since a

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• The Power 595 Takes the Top TPC-C Benchmark Ranking

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a goal of all the makers of big iron boxes to push the performance envelope, and not just because vendors have big egos–oh, they certainly have those–but because their customers are always pushing them to push the performance envelope a little further. Sometimes, a lot further. For the past six years, the cold war in the big iron space has been especially intense between IBM, the Unix upstart and proprietary system leader, and Hewlett-Packard, the Unix stalwart and Windows and Linux upstart with a smattering of proprietary big iron. The two server makers have been leapfrogging

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• The World Can’t Get Enough Disk Array Capacity

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over. According to the

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• Mad Dog 21/21: iPhone Home

  June 16, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn’t distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there’s a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals. In a sense, Apple helped

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• IBM Is Enjoying the Role of Green Giant

  June 16, 2008 Dan Burger

  If you believe there is an energy crisis in your data center, there’s a lot you can do about it. It makes no difference if you are Save the Planet green or Save the Bottom Line green. It’s clear that both are closely tied. For that reason, IBM is putting green-job-driven economics into practice. If it helps companies save money by reducing power consumption, Big Blue makes money by selling hardware, software, and services. And there will be plenty of green to go around. When IBM announced in May 2007 that it was investing $1 billion in an energy efficiency

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• Reader Feedback on Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs

  June 16, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You live, you learn. And most of the time, it is a collective effort, whether we all want to admit it or not. I didn’t claim to be the king of the job posting engines of the world in last week’s story, Forget About Platforms, Let’s Talk About Jobs. In that story, I queried the big three job sites in the States–Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster–for jobs that had been posted within the past 30 days and ranked job hits by various terms. The AS/400 and the iSeries did not do so well when ranked against

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