• Insurance Company to Install Lawson S3 on System i

  September 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  American Safety Insurance Services (ASI) has licensed Lawson Software‘s S3 Financial Management Suite to replace a 15-year old legacy system that relied on inefficient paper-based processes. The new system, which will be installed on IBM System i hardware, is predicted to decrease the amount of time ASI personnel spent on key processes by up to 40 percent. ASI is a Bermuda-based company that sells various insurance and reinsurance products and solutions to small and mid size businesses in Bermuda and in the U.S. The company, which is publicly traded and had $171 million in revenues for its last fiscal

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• Expand Bolsters Network Acceleration Devices

  September 4, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Expand Networks last week launched four new network acceleration devices designed to boost the available bandwidth between data centers and branch offices. The new devices deliver better support for wide area file services (WAFS), smarter acceleration of TCP traffic, and dynamic bandwidth throttling. Expand launched two acceleration devices intended for smaller branch offices, the 4830 and 4930, and two devices for larger regional offices, the 6830 and 6930. For each pair, Expand offers one device that includes a hard disk–which is necessary to support Windows WAFS services over a network, but which also introduces a security liability–and one device that

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• IBM Explains Its Domino 8 on DB2/400 Spike

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, this newsletter told you about how IBM had decided to not support DB2/400, the relational database at the heart of the i5/OS and OS/400 operating systems, as a data store for the new Notes/Domino 8 groupware that was launched weeks ago. This snub of the System i platform has annoyed many and will probably affect the Notes and Domino plans of some System i shops. Since this decision was made by IBM’s Software Group, not the Power Systems division that controls the System i platform now, it has been tough to get an explanation. The Systems and Technology

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• Consumers Create a Feedback Loop into IT

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, the corporate data centers of the world lead when it comes to the adoption of new information technologies, and sometimes they lag. And when IT is lagging, and a hot new technology is being picked up by tech-savvy consumers in their personal lives, it usually doesn’t take long for these people, who are end users as far as their employers are concerned, bring that technology into the workplace. And that is where the IT organization’s headaches begin. Two new reports, one from Yankee Group and the other from IDC, examine the issue of the consumerization of the data

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• Aldon Works on Acquisitions to Build Out Biz

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of its acquisition by Marlin Equity Partners in May of this year, Aldon, the dominant supplier of application lifecycle management software for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, is exploring its acquisition options as it seeks to build out a broader set of products to sell into this market. Thus far, the company’s plans have been unchanged by the uncertainty in the credit markets, and business continues to be good, too. Dan Magid, who was president and chief executive officer at Aldon prior to the acquisition and who is now technology strategist, and Matt Scholl, who is

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Leverage

  September 4, 2007 Hesh Wiener

  Archimedes was talking about leverage, one of his favorite topics. He said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” The Sicilian from Syracuse probably knew more about mechanical leverage than anyone of his era, which was the third century BC, but he didn’t know about financial leverage. Some people are still finding out about financial leverage, particularly on Wall Street, and doing it the hard way. What they cannot learn from Archimedes they might try to garner from IBM, which looks like it knows a little more about the topic than most companies.

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• COMMON Poll: DB2/400 Support for Domino 8 Matters

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we all know by now, IBM has decided to not support the storage of data for Notes and Domino applications inside DB2/400 databases on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform–something that end users had been anticipating since this capability was provided for other platforms nearly two years ago. The North American COMMON midrange user group and its counterpart in EMEA, COMMON Europe, surveyed their constituencies in the wake of IBM’s pulling the plug on NSFDB2 support on i5/OS. The results of these surveys seem to suggest that when Rob Ingram, Domino product manager at IBM’s Lotus division, gets back

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• Zend Preps System i Sessions for October ZendCon 2 Event

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  ZendCon 2, the second annual conference for users of the PHP language, is going to be hosted by Zend Technology in San Francisco October 9 through 11. And because i5/OS and OS/400 customers are important to Zend and IBM, Zend is working hard to provide content specific to the System i platform at the event. Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance program manager at Zend who interfaces with the i5/OS and OS/400 community, is hoping to get some sort of idea about how many of you want to attend the System i-related sessions at ZendCon 2, so the company can

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• Aberdeen Ranks the TCO of Mid-Market ERP Software

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The manufacturing and distribution sectors of the world economy have always been the backbone of the midrange computer business, and time may have changed a lot of things in the IT landscape over the years, but this is not one of them. There has always been fierce competition between application software vendors in the mid-market, and as long as there are midrange companies, there always will be. To try to give manufacturers a sense of where their current and perhaps future ERP software providers stack up, the analysts at Aberdeen Group did a survey of 645 manufacturing companies with between

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• IDC Gives 2006 Report Cards for Data Warehousing Vendors

  September 4, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IDC is handing out its annual report cards for the vendors of software in the data warehousing space. Because it takes a long time to gather and sift through the market data, IDC is only just now assessing who did what in the data warehousing generation and management tools market for 2006. The worldwide market was healthy in 2006, rising by 12.5 percent to reach $5.7 billion in aggregate sales. As has been the case for the past decade, the large database makers are big in data warehouse tools. Oracle barely outgrew the overall market, posting $1.9 billion in data

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