• Vision Ships Update for MIMIX for AIX

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  System i high availability software specialist Vision Solutions yesterday announced MIMIX for AIX version 3.0, a new version of the company’s high availability offering for AIX running on System p and System i servers. MIMIX for AIX is a collection of products designed to provide failover protection for critical applications running on AIX-equipped RISC servers from IBM and other hardware vendors. The software includes two main products, including MIMIX EchoStream, which provides continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities, and MIMIX HA Cluster, which provides high availability and clustering capabilities. The software was obtained by Vision as part of its acquisistion of

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• Cerberus Acquires United Rentals, And With it an i5/OS BI Vendor

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Cerberus Capital Management announced this week a plan to acquire United Rentals, a large, publicly traded i5/OS shop, and also the owners of InfoManager, a developer of business intelligence solutions for the i5/OS platform. Cerberus is best known to readers of this newsletter as the private equity firm that helped resurrect i5/OS ERP software developer SSA Global seven years ago, and funded its acquisition spree until SSA Global was eventually bought by another company backed by private equity, Infor, last year. Lately, the name Cerberus, which is named after the three-headed dog of Greek mythology that guards the

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• Ericom Launches Virtual Desktop Solution

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Ericom, a provider of terminal emulation solutions for 5250, 3270, and Windows servers, last week unveiled PowerTerm WebConnect DeskView, a new virtualized desktop offering that enables organizations to run their users’ Windows or Linux desktops in a virtual partition on a server, and access them from any secure computer or thin client. The move to server-based architectures has left some users behind, according to Ericom. Only about 75 percent of users at organizations implementing Windows terminal services are able to use the services to access their applications. The rest, who are typically power users, use virtual desktop solutions to

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• Wavelink Streamlines OS Upgrade for Barcode Scanners

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Users of Wavelink‘s emulation solutions for barcode scanners will be able to rest easy during operating system upgrades, as the Utah company recently announced it has adopted a way to make the OS upgrades seamless and painless when using Symbol devices from Motorola. This is quite a departure from previous techniques, according to Wavelink. In the past, updating a device’s operating system required taking the device offline, packaging and shipping the device to the facility where the updates were to take place, manually installing the update, and then reinstalling the host settings. Obviously, the new approach will save

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• VAI Hooks Up with BCMS for Merchandising System

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  VAI (Vormittag Associates) has formed a partnership with B & C Management Systems (BCMS), a developer of retail solutions for the i5/OS platform, to build a connection between VAI’s S2K ERP systems and BCMS’ 4Sight Retail Management System. VAI sells a version of its S2K ERP system designed specifically for the retail industry. The product includes Point of Sale (POS), accounting, inventory management, CRM, purchasing, warehouse management, and e-commerce components. BCMS, meanwhile, sells a more specialized merchandising solution, called 4Sight. According to Joe Scioscia, vice president of sales for VAI, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York, the partnership with

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• Global Hires Former Infor Manager

  July 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Global Software, the developer of software that allows users to view and update ERP data in real time through Microsoft Excel, has hired a former director, Deana Mitchell-Tavolacci, from the i5/OS market’s largest ERP software vendor, Infor, the company announced last week. In her new role as director of channel alliances, Mitchell-Tavolacci’s primary responsibility will be to develop, build, and manage new partner alliances for Global. In particular, she’s expected to use her knowledge of the Infor ERP XA (formerly MAPICS) and Infor ERP SyteLine products to build out Global’s reach in those markets. “I have been exposed

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• IBM Creates New Power, SMB Server Divisions

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past decade and a half, IBM‘s two midrange server lines–formerly the AS/400 proprietary server line and the RS/6000 Unix server line but now known as the System i and the System p, respectively–have been on a course to merge. First, they started supporting similar APIs, then similar Power processors, then the exact same hardware, including Power processors, memory, disks, and other peripherals. Then, they started supporting each others’ respective i5/OS and AIX operating systems. It would be logical to assume that eventually the System i and System p brands would eventually fall by the wayside and there

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• Rumor Du Jour: i5/OS on Other Platforms? Not!

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange press was abuzz a little last week about the prospect of IBM porting the i5/OS operating system to other platforms. While this would be an interesting development, and one that would quite possibly breathe some new life into the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, it turns out, alas, that such talk is not true and is the result of a misunderstanding of some comments made by an IBM executive at a user group meeting. It all started when Elaine Lennox, the vice president of marketing for what has been called the System i division until last Thursday and which

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• IBM Turns In Its Best Second Quarter in Six Years

  July 23, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT industry bellwether IBM had a tough first quarter in 2007, with its business in the United States slowing down. But in the second quarter, Big Blue’s U.S. unit rebounded as much as IBM said it might earlier this year, while overseas markets continued to grow as the U.S. dollar continued to be weak. The upshot is that IBM has turned in its best second quarter in revenue and profit growth since 2001, when the bloom was just coming off the dot-com rose. In the second quarter, IBM had sales of $23.8 billion, up 8.6 percent, with three of its

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• As I See It: Lawyers, Lies, and Statistics

  July 23, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Here’s a statistic guaranteed to curdle the cream in an IT professional’s coffee. The huge populations of China and India have produced a correspondingly huge crop of offsprings–628 million kids under the age of 15, give or take a village. That’s a lot of young people who will soon (if they haven’t already) enter the global labor market. Americans, on the other hand, have sired some 60 million moppets, who blissfully haunt the nation’s malls, unaware of the approaching competitive tidal wave about to engulf them. That’s a 10 to 1 disadvantage. Not good odds for future job seekers or

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