• Help/Systems Updates Robot/REPLAY

  March 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Help/Systems last week launched a new release of Robot/REPLAY, a companion product to its i5/OS job scheduler, Robot/SCHEDULE, that’s designed to provide a greater degree of automation in the scheduling of System i jobs. The product’s usability and security have been improved with the version 3 release, Help/Systems says. When setting up a job schedule to automate the workload of a System i server, an administrator will typically work with batch jobs that are, more or less, self contained and don’t require user input. However, every now and then, an administrator will run into interactive jobs that need to be

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• Oracle Updates Demantra for EnterpriseOne

  March 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Oracle is giving JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers access to the latest release of its Demantra supply chain and promotion planning software, the company announced last week. The move is designed to provide consumer goods companies that use EnterpriseOne better visibility into the effectiveness of their promotions activities, and greater overall profitability. Oracle first announced the integration of EnterpriseOne and Demantra, which it acquired in 2006, last July. At that time, Oracle hooked EnterpriseOne into Demantra version 7.1.1. With last week’s announcement, Oracle is enabling users of EnterpriseOne version 8.12 to various components of the Demantra version 7.2 suite, including the

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• Packeteer Goes Small with WAN Optimization Appliances

  March 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Packeteer last week launched a new line of wide area network (WAN) optimization appliances, the PacketShaper 900, which is designed to fit into space-constrained environments. Despite its small size and modest cost, the PS900 line of network appliances provides enterprise-strength network monitoring, shaping, acceleration, and compression capabilities, the company says. Packeteer’s new PS 900 line includes two devices, the PS 900 and the PS 900 Lite. Both provide full visibility and control over all seven layers of the network stack, allowing network administrators to withhold bandwidth for noncritical applications like FaceBook, while giving priority to critical applications like ERP systems.

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• Pragmatix Delivers SaaS Access to VAI ERP Apps

  March 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Pragmatix, a New York IT consultancy and managed services provider, is now providing access to VAI‘s S2K suite of i5/OS ERP software via the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model, the companies announced yesterday. VAI’s S2K suite is used by nearly 800 mid size manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to manage their businesses. The RPG-based application is traditionally deployed on a System i server running i5/OS, and users access it via graphical Web or Windows screens, or through green-screen interfaces. Now that Pragmatix has signed on as a SaaS partner, that model will change slightly. For starters, customers

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• Gumbo Creates Digitally Signed PDFs from i5/OS Spool Files

  March 18, 2008 Alex Woodie

  i5/OS shops using Gumbo Software‘s SpoolMail and Spool-a-Matic products can now create digitally signed PDF documents from their System i’s spool files, the software developer recently announced. Seattle, Washington-based Gumbo Software develops a range of software utilities designed to spruce up the System i server’s native print output mechanism. Key among these are Spool-a-Matic, which converts i5/OS spool files into PDF, RTF, HTML, and other PC formats and then places them in a predefined location on the IFS, and SpoolMail, which automatically e-mails spool files as ASCII or PDF attachments. With SpoolMail version 2.4 and Spool-a-Matic version 2.2, Gumbo

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• Bye Bye System p and i, Hello Power Systems

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s been a little more than a decade in the making, but I have a hunch that IBM is getting closer to doing with brands what it has already done with technology when it comes to its System i and System p Power-based machinery: consolidate. Server consolidation is one of the driving forces–if not the driving force–in the server racket these days, so there is logic here, and once IBM merged the System i and System p development and manufacturing operations into Power Systems last July, it has always been just a matter of time before Big Blue would do

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• The HP Pitch on Rehosting i5/OS Applications on Integrity

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having formally declared war for the umpteenth time on the mainframe last October with its Application Modernization Initiative in partnership with database maker Oracle and server chip maker Intel, Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to take a run at the OS/400 and i5/OS installed base. Getting customers to change platforms is never easy, even when they are not particularly happy, but rehosting environments certainly help and have always been part of such programs. And so it is with HP’s moves to get customers to leave their AS/400, iSeries, and System i servers. With Infinite Software (formerly known as California Software)

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• NetManage and Rocket Software Call Off Acquisition Deal

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a story that is playing out in every industry these days. The credit crunch on the world’s financial markets, caused by the American housing bubble popping and the consequent unraveling of the mortgage-backed securities that were making many of the big private equity firms flush with cash, has made it hard for companies to buy their way into new businesses. And so it seems to be with Rocket Software and its $69 million acquisition of host connectivity and application modernization software maker NetManage. Rocket Software, based in Newton, Massachusetts, is a privately held maker of utility software

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• As I See It: Bringing the Funny

  March 17, 2008 Victor Rozek

  One of the early traumas that children suffer is often at the hands of well-meaning parents who hire clowns to entertain at birthday parties. The grotesquely painted face, the loud unfamiliar costume, the over-sized feet, and the parental pressure to have fun because this is costing Daddy a couple-hundred bucks all combine to confuse and frighten the child. More than one party has been disrupted when the birthday celebrant runs off crying in search of his or her mother. Corporate parents–those practitioners of tough love known collectively as management–are bringing this same notion of traumatic fun to the workplace. Forget

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• HPC Sales Account for Most of 2007’s Server Sales Growth

  March 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The appetite for high performance server clusters, vector supercomputers, and a few exotic hybrid machines continued to outpace the growth rate in the overall server space in 2007, according to market research just completed by IDC. The so-called HPC market, which most of us old hands still think of as supercomputers, has always been on the cutting edge of technology, but in recent years, it has been one of the key drivers of the server market as supercomputing has become more mainstream. In addition to the casing of HPC server sales, IDC has also worked with the supercomputer industry–all

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