• Liaison Grows Its Cloud with Acquisition of HubSpan

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Liaison Technologies, a developer of security and data integration software that runs on IBM i and other platforms, has acquired Hubspan, a provider of a cloud-based business process management (BPM) integration platform. You can think of HubSpan’s cloud, called the WebSpan SaaS Integration Platform, as an EDI translator on steroids. The hosted application does the grunt work of executing, choreographing, validating, and monitoring the flow of data and business documents among multiple parties. But WebSpan goes beyond traditional EDI translation or even newer FTP-based AS2 messaging to support the vast array of technologies and techniques used to integrate

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• Equity Firm Merges Quadrant and Softbase, Eyes Further IBM i Acquisitions

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Candescent Partners last month announced that it has merged two of its holdings, Quadrant Software and Softbase, into a single entity. The move will pave the way for Quadrant, the parent company, to make further acquisitions in the IBM i and z/OS software market. Candescent acquired IBM i document automation software vendor Quadrant Software nearly two years ago in a deal that also saw the spin-off of Quadrant’s content management and workflow product line, called IntelliChief, into its own company, leaving Quadrant with the FastFax and Formtastic products. Candescent then acquired Softbase, a provider of z/OS coding, testing,

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• ManageEngine Bolsters Performance Management Tools

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Keeping applications running well can be a challenge in today’s complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Users don’t care whether their apps are running in “the cloud,” on a giant mainframe, or a cluster of PC servers. All they care about is whether the apps work and how quickly they respond. IT tool maker ManageEngine was at VMworld last week to announce several product updates that aim to simplify performance management in virtualized environments. Frustrated by slow applications, organizations around the world are turning to application performance management (APM) tools to help them get a handle on performance problems. According to a

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• IntelliChief to Provide Document Automation for B&L

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IntelliChief to Provide Document Automation for B&L IntelliChief and B&L Information Systems have partnered to enable IntelliChief’s document management software to work with Odyssey, B&L’s ERP system for companies in the foundry and die-casting business. The integration between IntelliChief’s document management software and Odyssey is based on the integration the two companies developed for BLIS-400, which is B&L’s IBM i-based ERP system, about three years ago, when IntelliChief was still part of Quadrant Software. Odyssey runs on the Windows OS, and is the company’s flagship product today. In fact, BLIS-400 isn’t even listed on the company’s website under

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• IBM Power7+ Chips Give Servers A Double Whammy

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are in the middle of acquiring a Power7-based server to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux workloads, you might want to give it a rethink about right now. Because IBM has some interesting twists that are coming out with the next-generation Power7+ processors that will dramatically affect their bang for the buck and therefore what you should be paying now for any processing capacity or whole systems that you acquire. IBM has been vague about exactly when the Power7+ chips and their new Power Systems servers will ship, but has said that the new processors will come out

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• Scant New Talent Is Finding IBM i

  September 4, 2012 Dan Burger

  IBM i shops are worried. Some would say things are well past the worried stage and the lack of college grads with skills that match IBM midrange requirements has become a huge concern. Coincidentally, there are a lot of college graduates with huge concerns about finding jobs. It shouldn’t be that hard to raise the success rate for both sides. Where is the breakdown occurring? Let’s start with a positive. At Delta Dental of Wisconsin, the state’s largest dental benefits provider and a company running its core business on IBM i, the IT and HR departments work together on a

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• TEMBO Taps inFORM to Distribute Database Modernization Tool

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  inFORM Decisions is the new master distributor of the Americas for TEMBO Technology Lab, the developer of database modernization tools for IBM i. inFORM is now taking the lead in marketing and selling TEMBO’s AO Foundation, a new tool that automates the task of migrating IBM i applications from the old ISAM database engine to the new SQL database engine, thereby reaping rewards in the areas of application performance and programmer productivity along the way. Executives for inFORM Decisions and TEMBO met at the COMMON conference held at the Disneyland Hotel in May. inFORM Decisions president Dan Forster and

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Has The PC Lost Its Mojo?

  September 4, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  When the top two suppliers of PCs to American business customers, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, posted financial results for the second calendar quarter, shareholders wept. Their results were bad, their outlook worse. Meanwhile, iPad sales soared. The non-iPad tablet segment, led by Amazon along with Barnes & Noble, recently joined by Microsoft and Google, just kept getting hotter. Moreover, PC makers Lenovo, Asus, and Acer seem to be on the rise, suggesting that the PC business isn’t doomed after all. Maybe it’s only that America’s two biggest vendors are executing poorly in a tough environment. Gartner

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• Server Sales Slow As Buyers Await New Processors

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No one was expecting for the server market to turn in a particularly strong second quarter, with so many different chips for systems either just entering the market or about to enter the market in the summer and fall. New processors always mean price/performance improvements in systems, so some customers buying now insist in price kits on current iron and others defer purchases entirely so they can get the shiny new boxes. Either way, sales in the current quarter have to go down. And that is precisely what the box counters at IDC have figured out as they cases the

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• IBM Buys HR App Maker Kenexa For $1.3 Billion In Cash

  September 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You remember the days back in the early Gerstner era, when IBM wanted to assure independent software makers that it would not compete with them so they would port their wares to Big Blue’s servers, operating systems, and middleware? Well those days are long gone, and the acquisition of human resources software provider Kenexa last week just goes to show it. Kenexa, which is based in the Philadelphia suburb of Wayne, Pennsylvania, was established in 1987 as a recruiting service for a bunch of different industry verticals. The company rolled out its first suite of software in 1993 and three

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