• OpenText Buys GXS for $1 Billion

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Canadian enterprise software giant OpenText last month got a little bigger when it completed its $1.06 billion acquisition of EDI and B2B integration software and cloud services provider GXS. For IBM i shops, the deal is noteworthy in that it includes the TrustedLink EDI software that traces its roots back to Inovis, Harbinger, and Peregrine Software. But this deal is all about the cloud. When GXS merged with Inovis in 2009, it created a B2B behemoth. At the time, GXS was considered by Forrester to be the top B2B service provider in the world, with more than 8

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• Essextec Buys Gemini Systems

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Essex Technology Group (Essextec) last month acquired Gemini Systems, a fellow IBM business partner with clients in the Northeast. Based in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, Essextec sells IBM hardware, including Power Systems, Pure Systems, and storage gear, and provides technical expertise in the area of security, high availability, and cloud delivery. The company has offices throughout the Northeast, and has customers in a variety of industries. Gemini Systems, meanwhile, was founded by Simon Leung in 1987 and is focused on providing IBM solutions to midsize and large companies. Essextec president Jim Torney says the combination of Essextec’s infrastructure and

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• ASCI Ramps Up Migration Effort for Job Scheduler

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to IBM i job schedulers, there are a few well-known entities that consistently make the shortlist during product bake-offs. The ActiveBatch offering from Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI) is not a regular on that list. But the company says it’s having success moving users from IBM job schedulers to its own. And with the newly launched migration service, it hopes to have more. ActiveBatch is an enterprise job scheduler that helps organizations manage workloads running across IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, OpenVMS, and Mac OS environments. The software supports time-based and trigger-based scheduling, and features an

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• Inuendo: An Associative Database Model for IBM i

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  It’s often said the strength of the IBM i server is its integrated database. However, while IBM‘s relational database is very much a rock-solid engine, the data models that people deploy on top of DB2 for i are often overly complex, brittle, and inefficient. One person who’s doing something about the legacy data models is Christopher Burns and his open source Inuendo project that distributes a sleek, SQL-based associative data model for the platform. Inuendo represents a radical rethinking of what a database on IBM i is–what it looks like, how it works, what it stores, and how developers

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• CIOs Not Feeling the Green (Screen), Survey Says

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  While CIOs around the world are enthusiastically embracing green computing when it reduces energy footprints and hazardous waste in landfills, they are not so thrilled with the other variety of green computing–the one that’s associated with old mainframe and AS/400 programs. In fact, CIOs are more likely than not to report that their 5250 or 3270 applications are doing a poor job, according to a recent Micro Focus-sponsored survey. The study of 590 CIOs and IT directors from around the world paints a dim view of text-based user interfaces, which are used by 93 percent of the organizations surveyed.

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• Midrange Dynamics’ Change Management Enhancements a Matter of Perspective

  February 18, 2014 Dan Burger

  A sequel to Escape from Alcatraz, that great old Clint Eastwood movie, is taking shape in IBM midrange shops. It’s called Escape from Green Screens. The plot is still being written and it won’t be done any time soon, but there are more shops using RDi with Remote System Explorer for editing source code. And the new free-form RPG coding is allowing RPG developers to escape green-screen development. A change management system (CMS) that works well in a modern development environment is a big advantage over CMSes that don’t–or no CMS at all. Midrange Dynamics, for example, is

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• Enforcive Gives Security Policy Checks a Graphical Makeover

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  You can have the best IBM i security in the world, but unless you have a way to prove it to auditors and other interested parties, the security solution is not complete. With the latest release of Enforcive Systems‘ flagship Enterprise Security suite, the company has added a graphical overlay to the security policy assessment component, thereby providing customers and auditors with an easy way to ascertain the strength of an IBM i security configuration. Enforcive/Enterprise Security offers a breadth of enterprise security features for the IBM i platform, including exit point management, object authority management, IP packet filtering,

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• BCD Lets the Mobile Flow with WebSmart 10.1

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  When developing mobile applications, the attentive developer must take into account the size of the mobile device’s screen to ensure a good experience for her users. With the latest release of its WebSmart development environment, BCD Software (now a part of Quadrant Software) added new capabilities designed to maximize the limited available real estate on mobile screens. BCD unveiled WebSmart version 10.1 just prior to being acquired by Quadrant in early February. The big new feature in the interim release is a new mobile reflow table template that improves the functionality of Web applications that present data in sortable

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• Remain Software Confirms Latin American Partner

  February 18, 2014 Dan Burger

  Remain Software, a Dutch company specializing in application lifecycle management (ALM) products for IBM midrange shops, is introducing its product line to Latin America through a business partner arrangement with Green Light Technology. Green Light has business partners in several South and Central American countries, and is based in Orlando, Florida. The partnership includes promotion, distribution, consultancy, and technical support for Remain Software products: TD/OMS, a software change management tool; TD/OMS Compact, software change management tailored for small teams; and Gravity, an ALM workflow management product. Jaime Penagos, a project manager at Green Light, says the Latin American

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• Hail Cesar: Italian Manufacturer Modernizes with looksoftware and RPG OA

  February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Europeans who are remodeling their kitchens may be familiar with Cesar, an Italian manufacturer of modular kitchen components. While Cesar improves the look and utility of 11,000 kitchens per year, the company was struggling to manage orders effectively due to an aging IBM i-based application. After adopting modernization tools from looksoftware, the company is concentrating on kitchens again. Like many small and midsize Italian firms, Cesar developed its own IBM i application with good old RPG. Its homegrown ERP system handles most aspects of Cesar’s operations, including all accounting and customer, product, and order information. While the ERP system

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