• VAI Satisfies Food Truck Routing Needs for Distributor

  March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Hillcrest Foods, a wholesale distributor from Saratoga Springs, New York, was having difficulty routing its trucks in an efficient manner. After implementing an IBM i-based ERP system from VAI, the company’s delivery route planning is handled efficiently. And along the way, the company made other improvements to its processes that will help pave the way for growth. Hillcrest Foods is a 33-year-old distributor specializing in delivering bakery, dairy, and gourmet specialty foodservice items to bakeries, co-ops, industrial food processors, restaurants, and pizzerias throughout the Northeast. The company, which operates out of a 40,000-square foot facility in which rail car

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• Bank Finds Scheduling Salvation in the Robot

  March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  As a Jack Henry & Associates‘ customer, Alpine Bank deferred on many items to the provider of its core banking system. But when it came time to eliminate slack from the schedule, Alpine Bank brought in the Robot/SCHEDULE product from HelpSystems. iSeries administrator Susan DeRocher is one of three staffers at Alpine Bank, a 39-year-old financial institution based in western Colorado. DeRocher and company oversee SilverLake, the popular IBM i-based core processing system from Jack Henry that is used by many midsized banks and credit unions across the nation. But in many instances, SilverLake was calling the shots.

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• IBM’s Unveils Uber MFT Suite to End All MFT Suites

  March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled a new collection of managed file transfer (MFT) software products that it says addresses the changing ways that organizations are accessing and moving data inside and outside the enterprise. The way that organizations are moving data with MFT is changing, IBM says. Instead of focusing on MFT technology and system-to-system transfers, the emphasis is now on the business use cases and ensuring operational visibility and adherence to governance. Enter IBM Connect:Direct Advanced 1.0, a new superset of MFT products designed to address the changing MFT landscape. The offering combines all of IBM’s strategic system-centric MFT products

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• Consider Tokenization to Avoid PCI Stress

  March 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  If your retail operations put you under the jurisdiction of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), you are likely experiencing a considerable amount of stress. You have sophisticated cyber criminals gunning for your sensitive data on the one hand, and foaming-at-the-mouth auditors looking to flag the smallest misconfigured setting on the other. What’s an IBM i administrator to do? If you talk to the folks at Liaison Technologies, the topic of tokenization as a service, or TaaS, will soon be broached. Liaison sells an all-inclusive data security product called Liaison Protect that includes encryption, tokenization, and

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• Systems Of Engagement

  March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The language may change from time to time in the computer industry, but the problems do not. Vice presidents of data processing are now chief information officers. Instead of trying to create massive systems to deal with telemetry from an array of radar stations, as IBM did with the SAGE project in the 1950s and what at the time was the most ambitious computer ever built (with over 60,000 vacuum tubes and an estimated cost of between $8 billion and $12 billion when it was completed in 1963), we have the Googleplex of well over 1 million servers that spans

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• IBM i Mobile Apps Challenged By BYOD Management

  March 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  Five C-level executives sit down to have a conversation about implementing mobile computing. Each one has his or her unique experiences. Some are under way with mobile projects, some are yet to begin, but have made mobile a priority. All are eager to share stories and compare notes on what has worked and what has not. And all of them come from companies that run their businesses on IBM i. One of them was responsible for bringing the group together to discuss mobile strategies, mobile device management, mobile application development, security, and the assorted and sundry challenges that can cause

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• Jim Sloan Steps Back from TAA Productivity Tools

  March 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Jim Sloan, the one-man development dynamo who has been writing IBM i utilities since the days of the System/38, has sold his company, Jim Sloan Inc., to a new group of owners. For now, the former IBMer will stay on as consultant to the new company, which will continue to expand and sell the popular group of utilities. The new ownership of TAA Tools was announced via a note on the company’s website. Sloan has agreed to stay on as a consultant, but the company has two new owner/developers to help build the product set: David Dykstal and Sue

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• Mad Dog 21/21: All’s Well That Ends Well

  March 17, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  In February, Oracle became just about the last enterprise computing heavyweight to get into mobile device management (MDM). Oracle’s entry came by way of its acquisition last year of Bitzer Mobile, a company with technologies to sequester data and applications on mobile clients. Oracle’s strategic effort to support sensor-laden smart clients amounts to a major reversal. Historically, Oracle touted, to little avail, thin, insensate clients, as did its sinking Sun. Oracle will undoubtedly find that the MDM business is incredibly demanding and viciously competitive. It’s not just Oracle. MDM is tough for every player, including IBM. Folio: Shakespeare’s

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• CIOs Move From The Back Office To The Front Lines

  March 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  As if CIOs, IT directors, and IT professionals of whatever title weren’t already under the gun for grinding out cost reductions throughout their businesses, welcome to the strategic enabler responsibilities. That’s good news if you have the financial and human resources to get the job accomplished, but bad news if you don’t. IBM i shops have a reputation for running with less total cost of ownership than AIX and Unix. There’s satisfaction in that, but what about that strategic enabler thing? If you haven’t heard about IBM’s Institute for Business Value, that won’t be true for long. The IBV

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• Disk Array Sales Rebound A Bit, Reversing Declines

  March 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite all of the software wizardry that storage array makers have come up with to help customers make better use of the capacity in their devices, revenues rose modestly in the fourth quarter. The revenue gains were driven by what can be now thought of as a decent uptick in aggregate capacity shipments, but to be perfectly clear the growth does not approach what seemed to be normal for almost two decades. In the quarter ended in December, the analysts at IDC reckon that the world’s companies, institutions, and governments consumed a whopping 10.2 exabytes of capacity across all types

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