• DataMirror Unveils Transformation Server 6.0

  February 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  DataMirror last week unveiled a new release of Transformation Server, its data integration software for sharing massive amounts of data among disparate systems, including DB2/400 and nearly every other major databases management system. With version 6.0, the company has improved the product’s GUI interface, augmented its support for multi-byte character sets, and enhanced its support for replicating SQL Server databases. DataMirror bills Transformation Server as a high-performance, bi-directional replication solution that keeps an array of target database systems and assorted middleware components–including DB2/400, DB2 UDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Teradata, and its own PointBase database management systems–continuously

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• Antares Finds a Systems Management Star in QSystemMonitor

  February 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Antares Management Solutions, an IT outsourcing company specializing in serving insurance companies, has picked CCSS‘ QSystem Monitor systems management software to oversee its bank of IBM iSeries servers, the English iSeries specialist announced last week. “The nature of our business dictates a critical dependence on effective systems management,” says Doug Powell, an i5 systems engineer for Antares, an ISO-9001 certified company based in Westlake, Ohio. “Our choice of System i had to be complemented by an equally reliable solution provider. CCSS understood our business needs very well.” While Antares offers a range of service level agreements to meet

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• Agilysys Updates Content Management System

  February 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  iSeries distributor Agilysys last week unveiled a new release of DataMagine, its Windows-based electronic content management offering for eliminating paper output from servers. With version 6.2, the product gains iSeries spool file support, as well as support for double byte character sets (DBCS), which enables it to work with Chinese and Japanese languages. Agilysys bills DataMagine as an industrial document management system, or DMS, that works with all types of computer systems. The software includes elements normally associated with content management–such as document scanning, indexing, and archiving capabilities–along with the capability to distribute electronic documents via e-mail, fax, the Web,

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• NGS Updates Business Intelligence for Vormittag

  February 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  New Generation Software (NGS) last week unveiled a new collection of business intelligence software designed to work with S2K, an i5/OS-based suite of ERP software from Vormittag Associates (VAI). NGS says it has developed a new module of its NGS-IQ suite that provides functionality specific to the latest release of VAI’s software, S2K version 3.7.5. The new functionality, which is included in the Real Time Reporting and Analysis module, is a new Web portal that provides VAI users with links to business trend and performance dashboards, reports, and multi-dimensional presentations built directly over the S2K database. The new module provides

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• BROWNtech Streamlines Access to County Records

  February 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Business was painfully slow at the Norfolk County (Massachusetts) Registry of Deeds. Until it implemented an i5/OS-based document management system from BROWNtech, that is. The Norfolk County Registry of Deeds is the principal office for real estate and property records in the county’s 28 towns. The office provides a range of services, including determining property ownership, researching land titles, and acquiring copies of recorded documents and plans–your standard county fare. The county used to track properties entirely by paper, which allowed it to process about 160,000 documents per year. This throughput didn’t cut it, however, as it would take

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• Midrange LUGs Are Changing the Way They Operate

  February 26, 2007 Dan Burger

  Adapt or die. The words represent the harsh reality of local user group (LUG) existence in the IBM System i community, which still often refers to itself with the collective moniker “the IBM midrange.” Since the later part of 2006, LUGs in two major metropolitan areas–Denver and Phoenix–have discontinued their operations. In other locations, LUGS are struggling to survive. There are strongholds, however, and they are doing relatively well with membership totals in the hundreds, regular meetings that are well attended, and annual tech conferences that are successful endeavors. The difference between success and failure can be attributed to a

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• Server Sales Up a Bit in 2006, But Q4 Looks a Bit Weak

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, it is not what people say that matters, but what they don’t say. The analysts at Gartner and IDC usually race to call each past quarter’s server sales by revenue, shipments, and platform type. But this time around, only Gartner has thus far released numbers, and as it did last year at this time, the company is talking about all four quarters of 2006 instead of singling out the fourth quarter. Uh-oh. It looks like the multi-core processors and integrated virtualization features in modern server platforms might be starting to have the constricting effects on the server revenue stream

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• As I See It: Disorderly Conduct

  February 26, 2007 Victor Rozek

  Can you focus? Can you read this article without bits of your attention splitting off like excess electrons? Is your concentration stronger than the pull of distractions? Mine isn’t. I wish I could write my articles in one sitting, but usually I can’t. My mind wanders and my body follows. The kitchen needs tidying; the mail waits to be retrieved; Bill Moyers is on the radio and I revel in the reminder that wisdom has not perished from public discourse. And because I work at home, I can indulge myself. In the winter, the sun is the worst distraction of

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• Gartner CIO Survey Shows Different Priorities for Business and IT in 2007

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Getting business managers and IT managers on the same page is always a challenge, whether times are good or times are bad. And if the latest Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) survey of more than 1,400 chief information officers is any indication, 2007 is not lining up to be an exception. But the things that CIOs will have to do to make upper management and bean counters happy might be a little different this year. This year’s installment of the Gartner EXP survey is officially called Creating Enterprise Leverage: The 2007 CIO Agenda, and it is based on data culled

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• IBM Kills Off VXA, Older Tape Drives for Systems i5s

  February 26, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buried in the System i5 announcements from February 6 was a note from IBM that explained the vendor was going to be killing off its entry VXA tape drives for the System i5 line. This may come as something of a surprise to System i5 customers looking for inexpensive but reasonably fast tape technology for their systems. The VXA tape drive is a descendant of the very popular 8 mm Sony tape drive that was commercialized for the computer business by the formerly independent and once high-flying Exabyte, which was acquired by rival Tandberg Data. Tandberg, of course, supplies

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