• Zend Taps Percona to Provide Support and Maintenance for DBi

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies last week announced that it has selected Percona to maintain and support DBi, the new version of the MySQL database developed for the IBM i platform. Percona is a well-respected provider of MySQL support services that competes directly with MySQL. Zend developed DBi to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL on the IBM i platform. The creation of a MySQL variant was necessary because Oracle dropped IBM i support on MySQL in late 2010. DBi was first revealed by Zend in September 2011 and shipped last month. It was initially expected that Zend developers would continue to

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• 10ZiG Shows Off its ‘Zignature Pad’ at COMMON

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  10ZiG Technologies had its latest product, the Zignature Pad, on display in the Expo hall of last week’s COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. The 12-inch tall pad is a dedicated signature collection device, and has features you won’t find with signature capture apps for an iPad. There are several aspects of the Zignature Pad that make it a superior signature capture solution in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, and real estate, 10ZiG Tech president Martin Pladgeman told IT Jungle at last week’s COMMON. For starters, the large color screen (12-inch by 7.5-inch) enables an entire document to be

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• VAI Signs 3 Northeast Distributors to ERP Deals

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  VAI recently announced the signing of three distributors in the Northeast to license contracts for its ERP software, called S2K Enterprise. The companies–J. Polep Distribution Services, Hillcrest Foods, and Reiss Wholesale Hardware–are midsize businesses right in VAI’s industry sweet spot. J. Polep Distribution Services is a Massachusetts-based distributor to convenience stores in New England. The 110-year-old company serves more than 4,000 chain and independent convenience stores from four distribution centers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The company selected VAI’s IBM i-based package for food distributors and manufacturers, called S2K for Food Enterprise Management, to drive its growth strategy, according

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• Symtrax Launches New Template Design Tool

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Symtrax recently launched Compleo Designer, a new tool designed to simplify the process of creating reusable document templates from the structured output of ERP systems, including JD Edwards and SAP. Compleo Designer was created to help users adapt to the continually changing business requirements surrounding their documents. The software allows users to quickly generate new electronic document templates from the output of ERP systems, and to modify them to meet their organization’s needs. These templates then are used to generate the finished documents, until the output from the underlying ERP system changes again, and the process repeats. The document

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• COMMON Finds Its Happy Spot With IBM i And Disneyland

  May 14, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i world descended upon the Happiest Place on Earth last week for the COMMON 2012 User Conference and Expo. Aside from a major malfunction in Disneyland’s IT system that saw the point of sale system go down across the entire property for multiple days, the show went off without a hitch. An estimated 700 paying attendees found themselves comfortably ensconced in IBM i education, 75 software vendors were content with attendees’ interest in their wares, and IBM eagerly showed off the awesomeness of its new PureSystems gear. The four-day IBM i extravaganza kicked off with the opening session

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• New RPG Open Access Standard Depends On XML

  May 14, 2012 Dan Burger

  A group of RPG heavyweights, including IBM, have come together in support of the first standard pertaining to RPG Open Access. But to understand RPG Open Access, start with the importance of RPG interfacing with other technologies. That’s not all that common. RPG has a reputation for its proprietary chains. Mistakenly this stops with the topic of green screens and graphical user interfaces. In reality, it is about the separation of the user interface from the business logic. This newly created standard, which was announced May 8, attempts to get below the surface. It is targeted at extending the

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• IBM Revives Power 770 Discount Deal For Spring Push

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in March, when IBM was hot to sell some of its fairly large Power 770 servers to close out a good first quarter, the company whipped out a quick rebate scheme for the processing capacity on the machines that I dubbed March Madness. It is not clear how effective this deal was, but it has come and gone and now IBM has a similar rebate to push some more Power 770 iron here in the second quarter. The original March Madness deal in announcement letter 312-038 gave the same discounts on two generations of Power 770 machines with

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• As I See It: Cloud Cover

  May 14, 2012 Victor Rozek

  Herb Grosch was the second scientist ever hired by IBM. And he was a good hire. His resume resembled an achievement highlight reel. It included doing calculations for the Manhattan Project, and helping develop the Whirlwind computer at MIT–the first system that actually operated in real time and used video displays for output. He was also the first to formalize the relationship between cost and performance in what has become known as Grosch’s Law: “economy is as the square root of the speed.” But perhaps his most fascinating insight dates back to the 1950s–more than a half-century ago–when he

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• Abacus Puts The i In VIOS With Screaming Power 720 Setup

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two things were made abundantly clear to me as I walked around the COMMON conference and expo last week, attending sessions and talking with people and listening to their complaints. The first is that just about everyone, even die-hard techies, are annoyed with the AIX-derived Virtual I/O Server that is used to virtualize disk and network drivers on Power Systems. The second thing was that we all better get used to it, because VIOS is here to stay. If you don’t want to cope with setting up VIOS on an IBM i or hybrid IBM i-AIX box with maybe a

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• Reader Feedback On: Apps And IBM i Evangelism

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This message continues to be delivered to the wrong audience. Most companies that use IBM i in their infrastructure are not in the business of software development. They build apps that are based on the database of third-party solutions or extend apps they have purchased from third-party vendors–such as JDE, Infinium, Lawson, PKMS, PRMS, PRISM, and so forth. Some of these have been screen scraped, but they still utilize the same old RPG III code under the covers, sometimes converted to RPG IV. Software companies need to build modern apps for IBM i. I don’t see that happening. It doesn’t

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