• Halcyon Boosts Spool File Manager, Company

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Halcyon Software unveiled a new version of its Spool File Manager this month that should eliminate much of the manual processing users previously had to perform to get reports into the format they wanted. The English software house also announced the hiring of a new channel manager, Sean Gallagher, who has been tasked with expanding the company’s presence around the world. Halcyon Software is an English software company that develops a line of systems management tools for the iSeries, as well as a line of tools for Windows servers. Halcyon has more than a dozen OS/400 systems management tools, which

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• BCD’s WebSmart PHP Enters Beta

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  WebSmart PHP, BCD Software‘s new software for creating Web-based PHP applications that run on i5/OS and other platforms, is now available for download as a beta release, the company announced last week. BCD announced WebSmart PHP about two months ago during the 2007 COMMON conference held in Anaheim, California. At the time, BCD and its development partner, ExcelSystems, committed to delivering the product during June–a deadline that the company hit (a rarity in this industry). “This is great news as this much awaited multiman-year PHP Web application development tool project is now being put into the hands of the

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• Trucking Firm Picks CCSS to Monitor iSeries

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Con-Way, the $4.2 billion logistics company headquartered in Northern California, has selected the QSystem Manager software from CCSS to keep an eye on its iSeries servers, the software company announced last week. The iSeries plays a critical role at Con-Way, a trucking company that was founded in 1928 in Portland, Oregon, and gradually spread east. The company relies on an OS/400-based transportation management system (TMS) that is very important to Con-Way’s meeting service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers, according to Stephen Wilks, senior system programmer/iSeries administrator with Con-Way. “If we encountered a significant problem on the iSeries and were

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• Atempo’s i5/OS Backup Software Highlighted by IBM

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Atempo‘s backup software for i5/OS, called Time Navigator Enterprise Edition for System i, has received the “Built on IBM Express Advantage Offerings” validation from IBM, the software vendor announced last week. Time Navigator is a backup and recovery product that works with a variety of hosts and tape systems. The most exciting feature distinguishing Time Navigator is its “point in time” recovery feature, which enables the user to recover a system to any point in the past from a point-and-click GUI, making it very useful for recovering accidentally deleted files, in addition to crashed servers. Atempo’s director of

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• System i Developer Announces Fall Conference

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Buoyed by the success of its first RPG and DB2 Summit, System i Developer (SiD) will hold a second RPG and DB2 Summit October 2 through 4 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the group announced last week. SiD is a group made of up four System i educators, including Susan Gantner, Skip Marchesani, Jon Paris, and Paul Tuohy. The group’s first event, which was held in March in Las Vegas, was a success, says Gantner, a managing partner in SiD. “Feedback at the March conference indicated strong support for the Summit as a bi-annual event, even among those who can attend only

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• Help/Systems Celebrates 25th Birthday

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  The AS/400 isn’t the only entity in the midrange celebrating a birthday these days. Help/Systems, the systems management tool vendor headquartered up in the North Star State, recently celebrated its 25th birthday. Janet Dryer, CEO of Help/Systems, attributes the company’s success to several factors. “First and foremost, a business must have customers,” she says in an e-mail announcement. “Our customers are a loyal bunch. Some of them have been with us since the System/38 days. And, the word of mouth of a happy customer is wonderful thing. Our customers are great evangelists for operations automation and business intelligence. “What

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• Xangati Detects Application, Network Problems with New Appliances

  June 26, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A new company called Xangati this week launched its first product: a rapid problem identification (RPI) appliance designed to pinpoint the sources of application and network performance problems, so administrators can fix them before they affect worker productivity. Getting a good jump on application performance problems can make the difference between a fruitful interaction with the help desk and the beginning of a trouble-ticket nightmare. According to industry analysts at the Yankee Group, about 90 percent of the time spent troubleshooting network problems is used to identify and locate the sources of problems, completely dwarfing the time it takes

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• IBM Kills Off System i ServerProven, Standard Edition Rebates

  June 25, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long-running rebate program that the System i division has sponsored to give customers who buy OS/400 and i5/OS servers plus systems and application software created by independent software vendors and certified through IBM‘s ServerProven program has been canceled. IBM made the announcement last week. IBM also killed off another rebate program for customers buying certain System i machines running i5/OS Standard Edition. The last time that these two deals were tweaked was back on January 30, when the ServerProven rebate program was modified to allow governments, not just commercial institutions, to get rebates. At the time, the

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• VoIP and the Search for Single Points of Failure

  June 25, 2007 Dan Burger

  At its most basic level, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is about moving verbal communications from phone lines to the Internet. In an article last week, Terry Boulais, the director of business development at Key Information Systems, began our introduction to VoIP by explaining its benefits and providing an overview of the technology that could usher a new era of application integration that takes advantage of corporate data and communication efficiencies. At Key Information Systems, Boulais is intimately involved in helping organizations deploy VoIP. His focus begins with network infrastructure, yet is closely tied to business planning, and

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• As I See It: Dare to Be Rich

  June 25, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Let me preface this by saying that what I’m suggesting may be illegal. Which is not to say that there aren’t a lot of wealthy people and corporations doing it. It’s called sheltering income and those who shelter theirs do so because they can; and they can because wealth provides them with a level of immunity from the laws they find restrictive-an exemption not generally available to toi and moi. So if you want to join the chorus singing Gimme Shelter, it may be necessary to adopt the same swagger and contempt for equity exhibited by the ruling

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