• Utah Distributor Picks IBS for Supply Chain Management

  December 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Superior Care Pharmacy will install a suite of i5/OS-based supply chain management software from International Business Systems (IBS) to help it manage its distribution business, IBS announced last month. Superior Care Pharmacy was founded in 1988 as a long-term care pharmacy, and added medical supplies, oxygen tanks, and an equipment rental division four years later. Today, the Salt Lake City, Utah, company has grown to supply about 2,000 nursing facilities, hospitals, and rehabilitation facilities around the country with supplies, oxygen, over-the-counter drugs, and nutritional supplements. Recently, the company set out to find a software solution that could help the company

  …

  Read more

• Link Likes look for System i Modernization

  December 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Link Computer, a Pennsylvania IT consultancy, has partnered with the Australian software vendor looksoftware for its System i application modernization tools, the companies announced last week. Many of Link’s 350 customers in the mid-Pennsylvania region use the System i server, and are now considering their options for modernizing their key applications without extensive redevelopment or replacement, says Tim Link, president and CEO of Link Computer Link assisted its customers in this modernization quest, which had been mostly fruitless, up to this point. “We’ve trialed all the key alternatives in a practical evaluation and implementation process,” Link says. Then Link

  …

  Read more

• New World Sells an i5/OS Solution–And 13 More for Windows

  December 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Like many ISVs, government software provider New World Systems offers versions of its applications that run on i5/OS and Windows, enabling it to meet the needs of customers with different server preferences. While the i5/OS version of its Logos and Aegis suites of software used to be pretty popular among county and city governments, lately the Windows-based versions of those products have been about 13 times more popular. New World, a privately held company based in Troy Michigan, is very good about posting new customer wins on its Web site (unlike some ISVs). From the beginning of October to the

  …

  Read more

• Calypso Sings Praise of Inovis for EDI

  December 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  English soft drink manufacturer Calypso has tapped Inovis to supply Internet-based EDI capabilities enabling Calypso to streamline its order-taking process, Inovis announced last week. According to Inovis, the 129-year-old drink maker based in Tattenhall, Cheshire, relies heavily on its Value Added Network (VAN) to funnel orders into its i5/OS-based System21 ERP system. However, the previous VAN used by Calypso was slow and unreliable, and that put the company’s business at risk. “EDI is a business critical system for Calypso,” says James Holmes, Calypso’s IT and CRM director. “Over 80 percent of our orders by volume are received by EDI, with

  …

  Read more

• State of the System i: How 2007 Went for Tool Vendors, and How 2008 Is Looking

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, I did two stories that gauged the pulse of the System i business among resellers of new equipment and then dealers of second-hand servers. In this third installment of the State of the System i series, I want to look at how one of the bedrocks of the IBM midrange–application development tool providers–are faring in 2007 and how they expect to do in the coming year. (This story, by necessity, offers the viewpoints of several of the dozens of dominant application development tool providers, which are but a subset of the hundreds of companies that provide some

  …

  Read more

• Emerging Markets and Virtualization Drive Q3 Server Sales

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Server lines, perhaps with the exception of IBM‘s System z and System i servers, did pretty well in the third quarter, according to the latest market share statistics from Gartner. The upgrade cycle in data centers and departments for 64-bit, energy-efficient, and virtualization-capable servers, coupled with raw growth in processing capacity in emerging markets like China, India, and Russia, boosted both server shipments and revenues in the third quarter on a global basis. As previously reported in their financial filings, Hewlett-Packard had a very good quarter for server sales in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 30, Dell

  …

  Read more

• IBM Readies Power Management for Power Servers

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It used to be called PowerExecutive, but the power consumption monitoring and management software that IBM created for X64, Power, and at some point in the future System z mainframes is now called Systems Director Active Energy Manager. Starting on December 14, AEM for Power V3.1, is an update to the March PowerExecutive V2.0 release, which was the first to support Power-based systems. The V3.1 update includes new features, many of them in particular to exploit power saving and power management features in the Power6 processors that will be spread across the System i and System p server lines in

  …

  Read more

• Bleak Outlook for Information Security, According to Researchers

  December 3, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Hackers, thieves, and malware writers continued to circumvent security measures and compromise the world’s computers in creative new ways during 2007, according to security researchers at the SANS Institute, which released its seventh-annual SANS Top 20 list of the most pressing security vulnerabilities yesterday. And next year doesn’t look a whole lot better, with an expected increase in parasitic crimeware, botnets, and targeted attacks on virtualization products, VoIP, and Vista, according to McAfee‘s Avert Labs, which released its Top 10 Threat Predictions for 2008. For the last seven years, the highly respected SANS Institute has published a list

  …

  Read more

• Computer Economics Study Predicts ‘Anemic Growth’ for IT in 2008

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s that time of the year again. All of the pundits, pollsters, and analysts are trying to pick the brains of IT managers to try to figure out where their budgets are going–up, down, or the same–in 2008. Computer Economics has been tracking systems and storage equipment pricing and IT budget trends since 1990, and has just put out a report that suggests IT budget growth will not be spectacular in the coming year. The recently released IT budget report is a subset of a larger study from Computer Economics called 2007/2008 IT Spending, Staffing, and Technology Trends, and

  …

  Read more

• The CDW IT Holiday Wish List, Budget Forecasts

  December 3, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT products distributor CDW hosted its Partner Summit in Las Vegas in early November, and at the summit the company did a straw poll of the IT executives in attendance to get a sense of what kinds of products or services they had on their wish lists for 2008; it also did an online straw poll among CDW customers, and in both cases also asked IT personnel about their budgetary expectations for the coming year. Last week, CDW released a report on the findings of the two straw polls. First and foremost, let’s talk about budgets. In the poll at

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles