• Accruent Fills a Gap in Real Estate Management

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Aside from salaries and related people costs, real estate typically accounts for the biggest expense on most companies’ balance sheets. However, most ERP suites lack the capability to bring all the necessary elements together to get the most out of their investments in buildings and land, according to Accruent, a real estate performance management (RPM) software developer. Now Accruent says it’s on the cusp of taking RPM to the next level thanks to the new graphics capabilities in Windows Vista. There are several factors driving the adoption of RPM software like Accruent’s, says Steven Wong, director of technology for

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• IBM Launches New HMC for Power 5 Servers

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Have an i595 on the horizon? Then you’ll absolutely need a dedicated Hardware Management Console (HMC) to manage its partitions. Even if you’re not in the market for the biggest i5/OS server on the market, you might be interested in the newest rack-mounted HMC model 7310-CR4 announced by IBM last week. IBM introduced the HMCs for iSeries nearly three years ago when it launched its Power 5-based “Squadron” servers, including the model 520 and model 570 iSeries servers. The HMCs, which before that had been used to manage pSeries and zSeries machines, were needed to eliminate a potential failure

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• Group 1 Addresses Change in USPS Postage Discount Rules

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Group 1 Software recently launched Address Quality Hub, a new address-cleansing product that will help users get the maximum allowable postal discounts from the U.S. Postal Service. Group 1 says the new product will be good to have this summer, when the USPS is scheduled to impose stricter postage discount rules. This August, the USPS will implement more stringent postage discount rules designed to reduce undeliverable-as-addressed, or UAA, mail. The USPS fails to deliver about 350 million pieces of mail every year due to address-related errors, costing the government about $60 million annually. The USPS hopes to improve address accuracy

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• Jack Henry Closes 15 Deals for Opening Act

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Banks and credit unions are snapping up Opening Act, a new program for banks that allows customers to set up accounts and apply for loans over the Internet, says Jack Henry & Associates, a Missouri developer of banking software. “Today’s convenience-driven consumers expect their financial institutions to host Internet banking sites that allow them to securely access their accounts, initiate transactions, and conduct research 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week,” says Tony Wormington, president of Jack Henry. “Opening Act, a production-proven addition to our Internet banking platform, is a Web-based origination system that enables consumers to seamlessly originate deposit accounts, consumer and mortgage

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• Seagull Gains Entry Into IBM ‘SOA Specialty’ Program

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Seagull Software, a developer of refacing and application modernization tools for the i5/OS platform, has been accepted into a new service oriented architecture (SOA) program from IBM, called the IBM SOA Specialty, the software vendor announced last week. The IBM SOA Specialty program was created to help separate the wheat from the SOA chaff. IBM business partners must meet technical and business requirements to be accepted into the program. Once they’re in, they gain the SOA backing of Big Blue, and get to participate in the IT goliath’s SOA-oriented sales and marketing programs. Kim Addington, Seagull’s executive vice

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• ProData Chips in Free Software for IBM Contest, Launches Contest of Its Own

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Students who are participating in the System i Innovation Challenge now have free access to a range of software products from ProData Computer Services. The Nebraska software vendor also announced a contest of its own, topped with a $1,000 prize. Last month, IBM and the online iSociety community announced the System i Innovation Challenge. This contest is designed to spur interest in the i5/OS platform among college students in the U.S. and Canada. The students who develop the best viral video about the System i and the best System i application win a trip to Nintendo headquarters in Redmond,

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• IBM Brings Drive-Based Encryption to Midrange Tape Library

  February 20, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Need to secure those backup tapes? If your shop is big enough, you might be in the market for IBM‘s latest backup technology, the TS3400 tape library, which packages high-end, hardware-based encryption capabilities in a midrange body. The TS3400 is a compact, 5U device that supports up to two TS1120 tape drives. These are the drives, introduced last fall, that use IBM’s proprietary 3592 linear Serpentine tape format (which it used to call “Magstar,” but doesn’t anymore). With up to 18 cartridges stored in two magazines, the TS3400 offers up to 12.6 TB of native capacity, or 37.8 TB

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• In Formation: Q&A with Infor Chairman Jim Schaper

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In Formation: Q&A with Infor Chairman Jim Schaper Because servers and operating systems are the backbone of the data centers of the world, IT Jungle spends a lot of time talking to the vendors of these products. But ultimately, if these products are working correctly in the data center, end users do not even know they exist. (This is obviously an idealized situation, given that operating systems are cranky and servers sometimes fail.) What end users think of as “the computer” for their company is actually the application software that runs on top of it, whether it was built in-house

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• GST Says Buy Cheaper i5 Disk Controllers and Lots of Disks

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Any time IBM puts new disk controller or disk drive technology into the field, that is a time when IT managers have to start looking at their iSeries and System i5 machines and figure out if the new offerings can be deployed to improve system capacity or responsiveness–either immediately, if disk usage is an issue, or during the next budget cycle when funds will be available for upgrading storage as well as other parts of the systems. Two weeks ago, Big Blue launched a new RAID 5 disk controller and new extended SCSI enclosures, and I talked to GST,

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• Chip Makers Strut Their Stuff at ISSCC

  February 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Chip geeks and semiconductor mavens from around the world converged on San Francisco last week to show off their latest innovations at the annual IEEE’s International Solid State Circuits Conference. This is one of the two annual events where a lot of advances in chip design are first revealed to the world–the other being the Hot Chips conference hosted in the summer. At last week’s event, Intel, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, and PA Semi showed off future server microprocessors. IBM’s dual-core Power6 chip was the first chip to be detailed at ISSCC. The Power6

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