• Original Formally Launches TestDrive-Assist

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Original Software last week formally announced its new product, first revealed in December, that helps companies implement software testing that fits their current development strategies without requiring disruptive wholesale changes. TestDrive-Assist, as the product formally announced last week is known, is a component of Original’s TestDrive suite that’s intended to allow customers to ease into automated software testing, as opposed to diving right in, which Original calls its “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach. In short, TestDrive-Assist enables users to manually test their software and include the results of those tests in Original’s test tracking system. Now, audit trails resulting from all

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• Payment Software Now Supports Card-Present Transactions

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Design Systems last week introduced Payment Courier 2.0, a new version of its i5/OS-based payment processing software that supports “card-present” transactions and credit card swipers. Payment Courier was introduced last year primarily as a replacement for manual payment processes. Instead of requiring customer service representatives to walk over to keypad devices and manually type in a credit card number, they could initialize and complete a transaction from Payment Courier, which features a 5250 green screen, as well as APIs for integrating with RPG applications. Design Systems developed Payment Courier, using LANSA development tools, for card-not-present transactions, as you would expect

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• Shield Unveils Enhancements, New Pricing Structure for JobQGenie

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last week unveiled enhancements to JobQGenie, an i5/OS utility that replicates and correlates job queue data to improve the recoverability of iSeries systems during a high availability failover. It also announced a new subscription-based pricing scheme. IBM and the i5/OS high availability software developers have done a good job writing software that replicates data and objects with a high degree of certitude, according to Shield Advanced Solutions, a company based near Toronto, Ontario. However, there’s one area that traditional high availability solutions did not address, and that’s the problem of job-to-data correlation across replicated systems. JobQGenie helps

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• Seagull’s LegaSuite Now Compatible with CentraSite SOA Repository

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  iSeries modernization experts Seagull Software is partnering with IT giant Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation to enable Seagull’s LegaSuite customers to park their Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) applications in CentraSite, a vendor-neutral SOA registry and repository co-developed by Fujitsu and Software AG, the companies announced last week. CentraSite was launched by Fujitsu and Software AG about a year-and-a-half ago as an open foundation for managing and governing SOA projects. CentraSite provides a central repository for SOA “artifacts” created by the various people involved, including “roles” like architects, process modelers, and developers. These role player can use CentraSite

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• Sheetz Taps Stampede for Application Acceleration Devices

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Sheetz, a $3.8 billion chain of convenience stores on the East Coast, has deployed Stampede‘s Application Acceleration Series to boost the speed of its WebSphere Portal applications. Founded in 1952, Sheetz operates 329 stores in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina, and employs 11,000. The company–one of the pioneers of the “convenience restaurant” format–is growing fast, having made the Forbes list of top 100 biggest privately held companies the last few years. To support this growth, the company has turned to innovative uses of technology. As such it was one of the first companies to use

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• Transoft Brings German RPG-to-.NET Conversion Tool to U.S.

  March 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Thinking of migrating your RPG applications to .NET? Then you may be interested in a new offering announced yesterday by CS Group Transoft, which has inked a distribution deal bringing a new RPG-to-.NET conversion tool to the U.S. and the U.K. CS Group Transoft, the new name given to Transoft following the Atlanta, Georgia, company’s acquisition by Computer Software Group in September 2005, is no stranger to iSeries migrations. The company has been involved in many iSeries migrations, and recently joined Microsoft ‘s Midrange Alliance Program to solidify its place in the cottage industry. Now, the Transoft organization has

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• What’s IBM Cooking Up for RPG and the Web?

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of its WebSphere Development Studio Client Version 7.0 announcements last week, IBM buried some statements of direction at the tail end of the announcement letters that indicated that it was working on making it easier for RPG programmers to create Web applications. To be blunt, many people were expecting such features in WDSc 7.0 last week, and they told me they were surprised when these features were not there. Last year, in closed meetings where journalists and analysts are not invited and in the wake of a controversy that IT Jungle helped stir up about the need for

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• System i Marketeer Chats with iSociety Members

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The general manager of the System i division, Mark Shearer, hosted an online chat with the members of the iSociety System i advocacy group last month, and this month, it was Elaine Lennox’s turn. Lennox, who has been the vice president of marketing for the division for a little more than a year, gave chat listeners (readers?) a sneak peek at how IBM will be marketing the System i platform in 2007. Not everyone has an hour to kill in the middle of the workday, so I participated on your behalf. As I go to press, iSociety has not yet

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• Midrange Boxes, Big Iron Drive Server Growth in Q4 2006

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market watchers at IDC have built their models of the business for the final quarter of 2006, and this time around, some interesting things seem to have been a-foot as last year drew to a close. IDC reckons that for the first time in a long time, the midrange and high-end server markets are outgrowing the volume server space (which is mostly X64-based machines these days). Moreover, revenue growth far outpaced shipment growth in the fourth quarter of 2006, which is a reverse of the usual trend. IDC has been tracking the quarter-by-quarter slugfest in the server market

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• The X Factor: How Many Servers, How Much Juice, How Much Money?

  March 5, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Data center managers around the world are complaining about the fact that they are running out of electricity to build out their server farms, and processor and server makers have been struggling in past years to deliver high performance products that can be virtualized and therefore be used more efficiently. The problem of power and cooling for servers seems to be a big problem, but nailing down exactly how big of a problem has been difficult. There are reasons for this. First, few companies know how many servers they have installed with any degree of accuracy. Servers pop up all

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