• Australian Importer Standardizes on Lawson M3

  April 29, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Monza Imports, an Australian company that distributes motorcycle and bicycle clothing and accessories to retail stores in Australia, has adopted Lawson Software‘s QuickStep Fashion, a preconfigured version of its M3 ERP system, to manage its operations, the software company announced last week. If you’re a bicycle or motorcycle rider in Australia, and you go into a store and buy Rock Shox forks, Dunlop tires, or Oakley sunglasses, chances are good that Monza Imports brought the goods into the country, stored them in its warehouse, and then delivered them to the store. The Melbourne-based company has been growing quickly lately,

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• Bally Technologies Bets on Quadrant for Document Management

  April 29, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Bally Technologies, a developer of gaming machines and casino management software, will install document management software from Quadrant Software to transition certain paper-based business processes from its System i-based ERP system into paperless processes, the software vendor announced last week. From its headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada, Bally Technologies is well positioned to serve the multi-billion dollar gambling industry with its collection of slot machines and gaming management systems. Much of Bally’s management software runs on i OS (formerly i5/OS), the gaming industry’s preferred server. Bally knows a good thing when it sees it, and so it, too, runs its

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• Decline In Vulnerabilities Belies Threat Increase, Microsoft Says in New Security Report

  April 29, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Despite a 15 percent decline in new security vulnerability disclosures during the second half of 2007, cybercriminals continued to successfully mine the Internet for profit, primarily by planting Trojan horses and other pieces of malicious code that steal people’s identities and perform other works of unpleasantness. These are the conclusions of Microsoft‘s latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which it released at the Infosecurity Europe 2008 conference in London yesterday. Since late 2006, Microsoft has been collecting security-related data it pulls from 450 million computers around the world–perhaps yours–and compiling it into a comprehensive view of IT security, with a

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• IBM’s Power Systems Sales Plan and Various Gotchas

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Language is a funny thing. As part of the ongoing merger of System i and System p product lines and the obliteration of separate marketing and sales divisions for these products in lieu of the single Power Systems division, which creates Power-based servers, and the Business Systems and Enterprise Systems divisions, which sell all of IBM‘s products to SMB and enterprise data centers, respectively, Big Blue is trying to control the language that its sales reps and business partners use as they pitch the new Power Systems products, pricing, and approach to OS/400 and i5/OS shops. Language, as it

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• Power Systems Performance: First Up, SAP BI Data Mart

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The performance statistics of the new Power Systems machines running the i 6.1 operating system (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) are starting to come out, helping customers who are looking at buying one of these new boxes and moving to the new operating system try to figure out what throughput the new systems have. Performance benchmarks on real-world workloads have been pretty thin for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform for a number of years, and thus far IBM is sticking to the relatively small number of benchmarks plus its own Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) ratings to help customers gauge relative

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• As I See It: That Competitive Bug

  April 28, 2008 Victor Rozek

  It has become an article of faith that competitiveness is inherently good, historically inevitable, and the fountainhead of economic dominance. It’s rare that business-related nouns appear in print without their default companion adjective “competitive.” The job market, global markets, wages, and prices all share the same pugnacious descriptor. As any first-year business student will attest: in order to be successful, companies must pursue competitive advantage by developing competitive solutions and executing competitive strategies. It’s a word that describes everything and explains nothing. With the emergence of India and China, and the maturation of the European Union, old economic relationships no

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• IBM Chases HP and Sun Unix Shops with Power Rewards

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Seeking to capitalize on the sunsetting of Hewlett-Packard‘s PA-RISC Superdome and HP 9000 machines and to convert the vast base of UltraSparc-II and UltraSparc-III machinery with the Sun Microsystems brand on it, IBM has launched a frequent buyers club marketing program called Power Rewards to try to convert the HP-UX and Solaris bases to Power6-based gear running AIX and/or Linux. The deal offers customers migrations services of a specified cash value based on a point scoring system that is tied to the Sun and HP iron being replaced. Why can’t IBM just say it is giving away migration services

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• Zend Puts 5250 Bridge Into Zend Platform for PHP

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While you might be interested in creating new PHP applications and running them on a System i or Power Systems machine with OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, or i 6.1, the odds are that as an IBM midrange shop, you have lots of green screen applications sitting around that need to be enabled to run on the Web. There are plenty of ways to take 5250 applications to deploy them on the Web, from IBM as well as third-party tool suppliers, and now there is one more being supplied by Zend Technologies, the creator of the open source PHP programming

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• COMMON Creates Scholarship Honoring Al Barsa

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Al Barsa, the recently deceased advocate of the AS/400 platform who passed away at the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month, is being honored by the user group through the establishment of a scholarship that bears his name. COMMON’s Education Foundation, a working group within the organization focused on educational issues, has created the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship to “honor of Al’s hard work and community service.” The annual award will consist of a conference registration and plaque, and will go to a person “who exemplifies Al’s commitment and dedication to the i community.” The

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• System i Resellers Stalled by Power Systems Transition

  April 28, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Under the best of circumstances, when hardware and software technology changes are modest, server product transitions can still be problematic. But sometimes, the changes are quite large, and this causes issues. Such was the case in the transition IBM did in 1993 and 1994 to the CISC-based AS/400 3XX, in 1995 with the jump to PowerPC chips with the AS/400 5XX boxes, in 2002 and 2003 with the Power4 iSeries 8XX machines, and now in 2007 and 2008 as IBM converges the System i and System p lines into the single Power Systems line. Resellers like to have transitions over

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