• NCR to Buy Retalix for $650 Million

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  NCR has inked a deal with the board of Retalix to buy the retail ERP software maker for $30 per share, or $650 million, the companies announced last week. Retalix develops software that retail chains use to manage their business. The company’s lineup consists of merchandising, point of sale, supply chain, logistics, and marketing components. Many of the company’s offerings are Windows based, including its flagship Retalix 10 in-store management system. However, its Power Enterprise line, which is a distribution-focused ERP solution, runs on the IBM i platform. Some of its offerings are developed in Java. Retalix says its software

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• Midsize Manufacturers Crave Mobile ERP, Survey Says

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Midsize manufacturers, one of the sweet spots for IBM i ERP, have a hearty appetite for mobile interfaces into their ERP systems, according to a new survey commissioned by South African ERP software developer SYSPRO. The survey, which focused on midsize manufacturers and distributors in the US with revenues between $20 million and $300 million, aimed to illuminate what decision makers in those companies thought of several questions, including whether they would like to have mobile interfaces to ERP systems, whether they’d like to have point of sale (POS) functionality embedded into ERP systems, and whether they would prefer

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• Trinium Keeps on Trucking with Mobile Interface from mrc

  December 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Chalk up another win for mrc, the developer of Web application development tools for IBM i and other platforms. Last week, the Chicago, Illinois, company announced the roll-out of a new mobile interface that it helped build for trucking software provider Trinium Technologies. Trinium-MC2 is a Web app that lets truck drivers communicate with their Trinium dispatch system directly from any smartphone or tablet. Dispatch instructions can be sent, received, acknowledged, and completed by drivers on their smartphones or tablets, the vendors say. Trinium says it already has more than 1,000 users of M2C, which mrc and Trinium

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• We Need A Baby PureSystems Running IBM i

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the holiday season, the time of giving. And, not coincidentally, the time of asking. I figured out a long time ago that you never get what you want if you don’t ask for it, although I must admit that at least in my life, asking has certainly been no guarantee of receiving. But asking is the first step. So here goes. What I want in 2013, aside from world peace, a pony, a little red wagon, and a sailboat, is an entry PureSystems machine that is actually suitable as the main data processing engine for the vast majority

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• Sandy Shows State Of IT Resilience Has Room For Improvement

  December 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Superstorm Sandy rearranged parts of the Eastern Seaboard a month and a half ago, but she is still remaking the business landscape. Some companies were ruined by Sandy, while some industries in the area, such as construction and car sales, are now flourishing. The National Hurricane Center changed how it categorizes storms as a result of Sandy, which is the model for a new type of storm powered by global warming. Sandy also poked holes in the disaster recovery (DR) plans of many IT organizations, and highlighted where improvement can be made. Some would say that it was inevitable that

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• New ITG Report Is Reinforcement For The IBM i Advocate

  December 10, 2012 Dan Burger

  Choosing one computer system over another has the potential to significantly reduce costs, but each individual company has to do some homework before coming to a decision. It is disappointing, to say the least, that many of these decisions are made regardless of whether they make good business sense. Can a business case for IBM i running on Power Systems be made when compared to Windows and Linux alternatives? Yes, indeed, when bolstered by reports like the one recently released by ITG. ITG, which is called on regularly to assemble total cost of ownership studies that build a favorable

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• As I See It: Still Buoyant After All These Years

  December 10, 2012 Victor Rozek

  IT is a buoyant profession. It stays afloat in turbulent economic waters. Just in the last four years, it has weathered recession, high unemployment, offshoring, outsourcing, looming austerity, and two rounds of quantitative easing courtesy of Ben Bernanke. (Quantitative easing is a banker’s euphemism for printing tons of money with little benefit to anyone but the bankers.) Nonetheless, it appears the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. If so, IT remains the one indispensable asset across all sectors and enterprises. Consider that during the ravages of Sandy, not every business was able to save its inventory, but you

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• IT Spending To Increase In 2013, World Ascends To The Third Platform

  December 10, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  The overall global financial outlook for 2013 is cause for concern. Many countries in Europe are heading into recession, and in the United States we are driving toward the fiscal cliff that threatens to send us plummeting into a second Great Recession. But lest we believe our financial woes are the only thing that binds our planet together, the folks at IDC say the world is in the middle of a technology shift that occurs only once every 25 years, and they are making some predictions for next year that indicate our addiction to electronic gadgetry is a worldwide phenomenon.

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• Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, thank heavens, we made it. The holiday season is upon us and it could not have come a moment later as far as I am concerned. Every year has its challenges, and here’s to hoping that 2013 is better and a bit easier for us all. I am thankful that I will be able push my keyboard aside and walk away from the desk for a bit. After a year of writing, I have a pretty acute case of word poisoning, as anyone copy editing me, reading my stories in the past few months, and my family and friends

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• Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9

  December 10, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone. What the two companies certainly agree on is that the server market is under pressure, and particularly in the non-X86 portions of the market as most midrange and high-end server makers are in

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