• Spinnaker Solves Payroll Issue for Big JDE World Customer

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  A large healthcare provider in the Midwest will be able to keep its payroll system running for the foreseeable future without making major changes to its JD Edwards World ERP software or its IBM i server thanks to software and services provided by Spinnaker Support, the company announced recently. The unnamed healthcare provider was in a bind. The company, which employs 3,300 across five states, needed to do something with its JD Edwards World payroll system before the end of the year. That’s when two related products–Oracle JD Edwards World A7.3 to A9.2 and the Vertex Payroll Tax

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• EVault Scales Its Backup Appliances Up and Down

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  EVault‘s line of backup appliances got a makeover recently, including a new high-end device that holds 38 TB of data, and a new low-end device that starts at a mere 500 GB. EVault sells two lines of backup appliances, including its Plug-n-Protect (PnP) and its Express Recovery Appliance (ERA). In August, the company introduced two new high-end, rack-mountable PnP devices based on Windows Server 2008 R2, and two lower-end Windows 7-based devices delivered as towers, including one PnP and one ERA appliance. The new enterprise-grade PnP3800 is EVault’s biggest appliance ever. The 3U device is equipped with 16 3-TB

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• Vegas Casino Expands IBM i Footprint

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The 300-room Silverton Casino Hotel in Las Vegas picked the IBM i-based Lodging Management System (LMS) from Agilysys to streamline and automate various aspects of its business, the software company announced last month. The Silverton Casino Hotel was already running Agilysys’ IBM i-based inventory package, called the Stratton Warren System (SWS). When it came time to select a new core application to run the hotel side of the business, the company naturally checked out SWS’ neighbor in the Agilysys stable, LMS. “We have used the Agilysys Stratton Warren System for many years and have been impressed with the company’s service

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• ASNA Helps Steel Company Off Big Iron

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Industrial Steel Treating Company (IST) is happy with its new Windows-based shop floor software, which it recently moved from IBM i to Windows with a little help from Amalgamated Software of North America (ASNA). According to a recent ASNA case study on the migration project written by Tom Stockwell, IST had gotten its money’s worth out of its custom shop floor program, which was originally written in the 1980s in RPG II to run on an S/36 minicomputer. But the time had come for the company to move forward, which meant moving the software to a platform that was cheaper

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• Slices Of i For The Little Guys

  September 16, 2013 Dan Burger

  Replacing chaos with calm while solving the mysteries of computer voodoo could earn you a pretty good reputation in the which-planet-am-I-on world of IBM midrange computing. It’s not that you’re more likely to get zapped here in the i zone than in any other IT fun house, but coming to grips with things like managed services and cloud computing have their own i-flavored outcomes here. Even for the little guy who is wondering how he fits into the MSP and cloud action. Larry Bolhuis has an idea or two about the MSP and cloud computing topics and a few other

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• It’s Time For Security Administrator Roles At IBM i Shops, Skyview Says

  September 16, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s time for system administrators to give up security-related tasks and hand them over to a dedicated security administrators in IBM i shops, says Skyview Partners. While the jack-of-all trades approach has succeeded in keeping costs down, the risks of losing data are becoming too great to rely on the skills of a generalist, says the company, which just published a new guide describing the role of an IBM i security administrator. “Security administration can no longer be lost in the list of things that a system administrator is supposed to do on a regular basis,” says Skyview president

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• IBM Aims NextScale Hyperscale Boxes At Clouds–And Possibly Power8

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is not quite as ready as it may have seemed to get out of the X86 server racket, at least not judging by the launch last week of the NextScale server line. And maybe, just maybe, the NextScale line of minimalist machines will sport current and future Power processors to give service providers and cloud builders a cheaper and denser alternative than the Flex System chassis announced a year and a half ago to build Power-based clouds. The future of the IBM i business may depend upon it, so getting Power processors inside of the NextScale nodes is

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• Mad Dog 21/21: For Blue It’s Difficult, For Meme It’s Easy

  September 16, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Thomas J. Watson started using the slogan “Think” while he was still at National Cash Register. He took it with him to CTR, which became IBM. It’s still part of IBM lore. “Think” has outlasted the typewriter, once a ubiquitous desktop symbol of IBM. “Think” is a meme, an intellectual artifact broadcast by cultural intercourse. IBM’s meme opened minds and doors to computing. Today, a different meme is the harbinger of technological progress in the white-collar workplace. It is the Staples slogan, “That was easy,” and its corporate curio kin, a red button that says “Easy.” For more than

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• Key CIO Confab Uncovers Concerns

  September 16, 2013 Dan Burger

  You’re not alone. CIOs, CTOs, IT department managers, and other executives wrestling with decisions affecting business strategies are increasingly turning to peers and partners to plan and implement their IT tactical strategies. At the Key Information Systems Summit last week, the core dump on topics–from cloud computing to business analytics to executive development facilitated by subject matter experts and IT industry thought leaders–was impressive. The format for the summit was round-table discussion groups of 12 to 15 people with expert facilitators, and is a far better method for strategy discussions, exchanging lessons learned, and displaying battle scars. The participants include

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• Stalled Budgets Stand In The Way Of IT Hiring

  September 16, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  After years of cutbacks and doing more with less, there is no doubt that IT departments around the United States are ready to start growing again. But it seems many companies are still reluctant to start throwing money into IT as they wait and see whether the economy is truly stabilizing. The analysts at Janco Associates have been deciphering the latest numbers in the IT slice of the job market, and although August did see a modest gain of 7,000 new IT jobs, many companies continue to wait for the green light from executive management to increase spending. Victor Janulaitis,

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