• CCSS Signs Texas Insurance Company to Software Deal

  April 1, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Like most System i shops, Southwest Business Corporation (SWBC) deeply relies on its servers to conduct business. If the servers are not running, the company is not making money. To that end, the financial services company from San Antonio, Texas, recently installed i5/OS systems management software from CCSS to more closely monitor its two System i servers. SWBC sells a range of insurance products and financial services, such as accidental death insurance, employee benefits, and mortgage insurance to credit unions, mortgage companies, banks, and other financial services companies. It was founded in 1976, and has been running on the System

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• Drummond Group Releases Latest AS3 Certs

  April 1, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Only five B2B software vendors participated in the latest Drummond Group interoperability certification tests for AS3, which were released two weeks ago. Nevertheless, nearly all of them offer products that deliver AS3 interoperability for i5/OS systems. Drummond has been running interoperability tests for the AS3 (EDI over FTP) protocol for the last three years. Since that first test, AS3 adoption has increased in the market, as any new standard would. However, its adoption lags behind its more popular e-mail-based B2B protocol brethren, the AS2 standard, even though the “push-pull” nature of the AS3 standard offers more flexibility in how invoices,

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• Xangati Launches End-User Network Troubleshooter

  April 1, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Xangati last week launched an innovative network troubleshooting product designed to give frontline helpdesk personnel a clearer view of end-user network activities. Called Virtual Task Manager, the software gives users of its Rapid Problem Identification (RPI) helpdesk appliance a direct view of end-user desktop activities and possible causes of network problems, thereby satisfying end-user issues while allowing organizations to solve problems quicker and less expensively. Anybody who’s ever worked on a balky network or experienced e-mail problems knows the drill. Call up technical support, explain the problem, then pray to one’s deity of choice that they take the issue seriously

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• Progress Is Our Most Important Product

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the 1960s, when General Electric was still a maker of computers in addition to lots of other gadgetry, the company had a catchy slogan, one perhaps even more famous than IBM‘s “Think” admonition from its stern founder, Thomas Watson. That GE slogan–“”–has become as much of the modern business lexicon as the suggestion that we should think outside of boxes or that team does not have an “i” in it. This is all particularly ironic to me as I sit here on a cloudy New York Friday afternoon, mulling over IBM’s tactics and strategies for the OS/400 and

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• i5/OS V6R1: Raining on the Armadillo Day Parade

  March 31, 2008 Dan Burger

  I would estimate that 99 percent of System i users did not have March 21 circled on their calendars. The release date of i5/OS V6R1 came and went with considerably less fanfare than Armadillo Day (October 18), which is to say there was very little fanfare at all. And that’s not to say V6R1 is less exciting than an armadillo. It definitely is more exciting than an armadillo. It’s just that in the i5/OS world, the availability of a new operating system does not cause long lines of excited customers eager to get their hands on it. The reason I

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• Oracle’s Business Grows in Fiscal Q3, But Not As Much as Expected

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are the second largest provider of ERP software in the world, the leader in databases, and the contender for the leadership position in middleware, people watch how your business is going, particularly with so much talk about a potential or actual recession in the U.S. economy these days. And so it was as Oracle announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter last Wednesday and gave Wall Street a bit of a disappointment. Most companies would kill to have Oracle’s numbers, but the company’s earnings were lower than expected and its warnings about future growth prospects put

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• As I See It: Misera Plebs Contribuens

  March 31, 2008 Victor Rozek

  Greetings, misera plebs contribuens! It’s what the Hungarian people started calling themselves after King Andreas II exempted the nobility from taxation–an immunity which, like one, long, baronial happy meal, lasted from the 13th to the 19th century. It means “miserable tax-paying people,” and if you’ve already prepared this year’s return, you probably feel like one. Sucker. One third and perhaps as many as one half of eligible tax filers either cheat on their returns or don’t file a return at all. And their numbers, like springtime pollen counts, are exploding. In 1985, there were 3.4 million nonfilers. Just two

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• Novell Previews Features in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Novell hosted its annual BrainShare event last week in Salt Lake City, Utah, and probably the key announcement that the company made to the 5,500 attendees at the event and the untold numbers who participated secondarily through the Internet was the preview of some of the features and development plans (in the absence of features) in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 operating system. But don’t hold your breath waiting for SUSE Linux 11, since it is not coming to market any time soon, apparently. The exact timing for the launch of SUSE Linux 11 is difficult to pin down

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• IBM Puts Out First Cumulative PTF Patches for i5/OS V6R1

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On March 21, which was two Fridays ago, IBM began shipping i5/OS V6R1, the latest iteration and a substantially improved version of the venerable family of operating systems for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform. It is a big set of patches. How big? Well, according to System i PTF Guide editor and IBM System i business partner, Doug Bidwell, chief techie at DLB Associates, the i5/OS V6R1 cumulative patches come on a DVD, and the current crop of patches weighs in at 3.74 GB. “Yep, it’s a biggy,” says Bidwell. “You got to wonder what kind of

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• Ask TPM: Where Is the System i Technical Conference?

  March 31, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While IBM has been pretty tight-lipped about whatever announcement it has in store for the COMMON user group town hall meeting that is slated for April 2, there is some evidence that is coming to me from a different source–and intended to only answer a separate question–that indicates that my hunch that IBM is going to converge the System i and System p brands is probably correct. One System i shop sent me an email a few weeks ago, asking me when and where the next System i Technical Conference would be held. I made some smart-aleck comment about not

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