• Portlet Factory Added to IBM WebSphere Portal Express

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced it has added the WebSphere Portlet Factory to WebSphere Portal Express version 6.0, which shipped in February 2007. The move gives IBM customers another reason to buy WebSphere Portal Express, which runs natively on i5/OS, and should make it easier for customers to develop customized, JSR-168 compliant portlets for use in their company Web portals. The WebSphere Portlet Factory, which IBM obtained with its acquisition of Bowstreet a little over a year ago, is a Windows-based tool designed to simplify the development of J2EE portlet applications and eliminate the need for direct coding. Instead of requiring

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• SafeData Signs Six New Hosted HA Deals

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  SafeData signed up six companies in December to use its hosted i5/OS high availability (HA) service, the company announced yesterday. SafeData says the new deals indicate the need for managed i5/OS HA is quite high at the moment, especially considering that the bulk of the HA software is controlled by a single company. Since SafeData launched its hosted HA and DR service in 2005, the company has been touting the benefits customers receive by offloading their DR and HA setups to the Warwick, Rhode Island, company. Usually the customer accolades would arrive one by one. But yesterday, SafeData revealed no

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• BOSaNOVA Cranks the Clock on Thin Clients

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  BOSaNOVA has given a speed boost to its low-end and top-of-the-line thin clients alike. Last week, the Phoenix, Arizona, company announced that its 1300 line of Windows and Linux thin clients are now equipped with VIA chips running at 1.5 GHz. The low-end RBT also received a faster new VIA processor. Unveiled a year ago, the Windows-based XTC-1300 and the Linux-based LTC-1300 featured VIA processors running at 1.3 GHz. With the new 1.5 GHz processor and an 8X AGP graphics accelerator card, unveiled last summer, BOSaNOVA is making sure users don’t have to compromise graphics when making the

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• PowerTech Joins PCI Standards Body

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  PowerTech has joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a participating organization, providing another i5/OS voice in the continuing evolution of the standard. As one of 384 participating organizations, PowerTech will work with the group to evolve the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) and other payment card data protection standards backed by financial giants like American Express, Discover Card, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa, which took the initiative in creating the DSS. “We are pleased to be accepted as a participating organization in this important security standards organization,” says Jon Scott, president and CEO of PowerTech. “The IBM System i

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• Soft Phone Certified for System i IP Telephony

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A Swiss company, iscoord, is the first IBM business partner to receive certification ensuring compatibility between a software-based IP phone and the System i IP Telephony solution jointly offered by IBM and 3Com. In late December, iscoord announced it successfully completed interoperability testing between its isphone and 3Com’s VCX platform, which is the basis for the System i IP Telephony Solution that became available last year. The testing was conducted as part of 3Com’s Open Network Program, and iscoord received the 3Com Solution Validated certification for its efforts. The isphone was written in Java and uses the session

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• SugarCRM 5.0 Now Generally Available

  January 15, 2008 Alex Woodie

  SugarCRM last month announced the general availability of Sugar 5.0, the first major release of the open source CRM package since the company announced support for the System i server last summer. The Sugar CRM package is part of a new class of open source enterprise applications written for the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) architecture that’s making headway against the traditional closed-source, platform-centric development process. Last summer, IBM and SugarCRM announced a partnership to port Sugar to i5/OS, thereby providing iSeries and System i users with another option for CRM on the platform. By late summer,

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• The Official 2008 TPM System i Wish List

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year, and a time when IBM is not only readying a new line of Power-based servers and an improved i5/OS operating system, but also rejiggering its Systems and Technology Group to do a better job chasing server sales among small and medium businesses and to preserve its strength in the enterprise server space. Before the concrete is poured into the 2008 forms, it is probably a good idea for all of us to give Big Blue a sense of the things we would like it to do with the System i product line.

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• Bracing for i5/OS V6R1 and the Winding Down of V5

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the two decades I have been watching the systems and server racket, the OS/400 and i5/OS family of operating systems have probably given their nearly 300,000 or so unique customers the least amount of trouble possible for a complex computer system running mission-critical applications. While some people have crabbed about bugs in particular releases since 1988 or were upset in 1995 and 1996 by the troubles they had making the CISC-to-RISC jump, software upgrades have been a comparatively easy process. And so, as we look ahead this year to the launch of i5/OS V6R1, which is in final best

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• IBM Gets Clustered Storage and EMC Founder with XIV Buy

  January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The company’s name is pronounced “Ex Eye Vee,” and it stands for the Roman numeral for “fourteen,” in honor of the fourteenth class of the Talpiot technical university, run by the Israeli military, that XIV Limited‘s founders all hail. And now the Israeli startup specializing in clustered disk storage is part of IBM‘s System Storage unit, which has its hands on the small company’s substantial expertise in block-level, virtualized, clustered storage arrays. IBM and XIV did not detail the price it paid for the company, but the Israeli business newspaper Globes reported on December 30, several days before

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• As I See It: Weighty Matters

  January 14, 2008 Victor Rozek

  The package arrived the day before Christmas. It came all the way from the East coast courtesy of my in-laws. As soon as my wife saw it, she got a sly look on her face and urged me to open it because, she said, it was “time sensitive.” But my father-in-law is to packaging what Madonna is to restraint, so opening one of his packages requires a great deal of patience and resolve. Having a modest cache of explosives wouldn’t hurt either. So I gathered a chisel, a hammer, a sharp knife, and a sturdy pair of pruning shears and

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