• Love’s Likes CCSS for PCi

  May 27, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores has selected CCSS‘ system management tools for i (formerly i5/OS) to help it comply with a regulatory mandate. With QMessage Monitor keeping track of events occurring in the company’s audit journal, IT professionals feel confident that they have their bases covered when it comes to PCI compliance. Since it was founded in 1964, Love’s has been making a name for itself with its chain of locations across the country, which now number 210 in 33 states. At each Love’s location, travelers have access to a gas station, a convenience store, a gift shop,

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• Orphaned Account Risk Underestimated, Symark Says

  May 27, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A survey commissioned by Symark International found a disturbing level of management ignorance concerning orphaned accounts, or user accounts that remain active after an employee has left a company. The survey suggest that one in three organizations has little knowledge or control over orphaned accounts, which increases the risk of a disgruntled former user compromising an organization’s security. Symark’s survey of 850 IT, C-level and HR executives, which was conducted earlier this year by eMediaUSA, examined the prevalence of orphaned accounts in the enterprises, and the processes the enterprises have in place to locate and terminate them. Here are some

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• Pepsi Bottler Uncorks Application Modernization with looksoftware

  May 27, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Northeast Wisconsin (Pepsi NEW) has selected looksoftware‘s application modernization solutions to update the interfaces of legacy OS/400 applications and provide integration with Microsoft Outlook, the software company announced last week. For the last 25 years, Pepsi NEW has been serving more than 300 products to 2,500 customers in the greater northeast Wisconsin region. In support of this operation, the independent franchise, which is based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, has relied on some pretty old RPG II code to power its OS/400-based applications. However, those applications were beginning to show their age, which precipitated a search

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• JDE EnterpriseOne Certified for i 6.1

  May 27, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Oracle‘s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne has been certified to run on the latest release of IBM i5/OS operating system, i 6.1, the software giant announced last week. According to an Oracle spokesperson, EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97 update 1 (8.97.1.0) has been validated to run on IBM i 6.1. That release of the tools is used with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application releases 8.9, 8.10, 8.11, 8.11 SP1, and 8.12. (Like other ERP vendors, Oracle separates its software into tools releases and application releases, in hopes of insulating the applications from changing operating system releases and updates to other ancillary products.) With the

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• Manufacturer’s JDE System to Be Extended with SM-Plus

  May 27, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Terumo Cardiovascular Systems (CVS), a manufacturer of products used during heart surgery, has adopted Single Source Systems‘ Service Management-Plus (SM-Plus) asset management system to replace an obsolete AS/400-based service management system, the vendor announced recently. Terumo CVS develops and manufactures medical devices for the global cardiac surgery market, including Vascutek vascular grafts, monitoring devices, heart-lung machines, and other precision tools. The company, which is a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Terumo, has locations in Michigan, Maryland, and California, and utilizes Oracle‘s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system to manage various aspects of its business. Up until recently, Terumo CVS

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• The Way IBM Sees New Versus Prior i Platforms

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of any major server launch, IBM‘s top marketeers have usually put together two sets of comparisons for IBM’s own sales reps and its business partner resellers. One set of comparisons looks at the new product line and compares and contrasts it with the immediately prior product line, usually highlighting scalability increases or price/performance improvements for given configurations. In the AS/400 family, IBM used to make a lot more comparisons to Unix and other proprietary platforms, too, which helped customers remain confident that the platform was competitive. The latter type of competitive platform comparisons are not usually

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• The Server Biz Enjoys the X64 Upgrade Cycle in Q1

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a lot of vintage server iron out there in the world, and most of it could only be classified as energy efficient if the characterization was being done by a pathological liar. The same holds true for a lot of RISC/Unix iron. And with energy costs rising, companies wanting to scale their applications without paying for new data centers, and the desire to have systems that can better exploit virtualization, server makers enjoyed a pretty good first quarter for shipments and sales from January through March, according to statistics compiled by Gartner. In the first quarter of

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• Evans Data Ranks Integrated Development Environments

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Farmers have their tractors. Managers have their PowerPoint and Excel programs. Plumbers have their wrenches and torches. And programmers have something given the utterly inelegant name of the integrated development environment, which just goes to show you that the marketing people get to name things far too often. Call it what you will, but the IDE is the tool that most of the professional programmers in the world–and there are millions and millions of them–stare at each day as they craft the applications that let the rest of us do our work. Picking the right IDE is not an easy

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• As I See It: The Programmer as Artist

  May 27, 2008 Victor Rozek

  It has been variously described as art, science, a teachable skill, a creative process, and an exercise in logic. And because it can boast of having all those properties, the nature of programming remains as elusive as good government. The challenge in pinning down the essence of programming is that no single descriptor is exact or sufficient. Almost anything you can say about it elicits a “yes, but. . .” reaction. Yes, programming has artistic elements, but how artistic is an accounting program? Yes, IT began as Computer Science, and during the formative years programmers wore lab coats and coded

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• Reseller Mainline to Acquire Competitor Cornerstone

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The consolidation crunch in the server reseller space continued last week as Mainline Information Systems of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California. The combination of the two firms brings together two of IBM‘s largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Both companies have unashamedly referred to themselves as “True Blue” resellers, and focus exclusively on IBM’s servers, operating systems, databases, and middleware or software that is officially pushed by IBM itself, such as Linux or VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor for X64 iron. Mainline has also used

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