• Infor Welcomes Lawson Users to Annual Conference

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor is gearing up for Sunday’s start of Inforum 2012, its annual user conference. This year’s show, to be held in Denver, Colorado, combines Inforum and Lawson CUE (conference and user exchange) into a single show for all Infor and Lawson customers. And as luck would have it, Inforum 2012 takes place at the same time that Oracle is hosting its big Collaborate 2012 get-together for its JD Edwards customers. There is a lot of activity going on right now at Infor as it relates to the Lawson business. Since the merger was finally consummated earlier this month, the

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• Zend DBi Goes GA

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  DBi, the drop in replacement for the MySQL database running under IBM i, is now generally available from Zend Technologies. The database is fully supported by Zend, providing a secure and straightforward path for IBM i shops to run prepackaged PHP applications designed to work with MySQL. The new database ships as DBi version 5.1.59, according to Zend’s release notes. The package also includes the latest IBMDB2i storage engine, which enables PHP applications that use MySQL to actually store data in DB2/400. Zend’s release notes describe how to install DBi on the IBM i server via FTP. The product’s

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• INPRO Enables Multiple Time Zones–In Just One LPAR!

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops can support users and applications running in different time zones within the same logical partition (LPAR) using the latest software from INPRO International. The company recently announced that this capability is available in TZN/400 6.1.P. According to INPRO, the new release of its TZN/400 tool allows IBM i shops to support dozens of time zones in the same LPAR. Users in different parts of the world interact with their applications and reports in their local time, instead of the time zone in which the server happens to be physically located. IBM i has supported multiple time

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• Joomla’s CMS Surges in Popularity

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007. Things seem to be going well for the Joomla CMS, which the organization says is used to power about 2.7 percent of the world’s websites, or about 1.6 million websites by one count. And there’s a lot more in the pipeline. The organization says that at the end of March 2011, the CMS had been downloaded 22 million times.

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• IBM i Homepage Gets Refreshed with PureSystems Launch

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve visited the IBM i homepage since the big PureSystems launch a week ago, you’ve noticed that things looks a bit different. IBM i regulars will see that familiar navigational aids to view information about IBM i hardware, software, solutions, and news are gone, in favor of a sleeker, more modern look that features easy access to Twitter and Facebook. IBM is definitely on the cutting edge of IT, as it proved with last week’s launch of the new PureSystems line of systems, which feature autonomic management capabilities that should dramatically reduce the care and feeding required to

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• IBM Buys Varicent for Cloud-Based Sales Performance Management

  April 17, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The big gold rush in the cloud is on, and the latest outfit to strike it rich is Varicent, a developer of compensation and sales performance management software. It was snapped up last week by a cloud- and analytics-hungry IBM for an undisclosed sum. Varicent’s compensation and sales performance software is used by companies that use salespeople to drive much of their revenue. By more effectively managing the sales-related data–which is often spread across PCs and spreadsheets–Varicent can drive more profits from sales, and ensure that the variable rate of compensation for the salespeople is “aligned with strategic business

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• IBM Launches Hybrid, Flexible Systems Into The Data Center

  April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a little time and a lot of money to roll out a new server architecture, and even a company as large as IBM can’t do it very often. The System/360 in 1964. The System/38 in 1979 and its follow-on, the AS/400, in 1988. The RS/6000 in 1990. The BladeCenter in 2002, and the Sequent-inspired clustered server nodes in the xSeries and pSeries in the mid-2000s. iDataplex in 2008. And now the PureSystem converged infrastructure launched last week, in 2012. IBM started designing the BladeCenter blade server back in 1999, when some enterprise-class companies were pretty fed up with

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• A Closer Look At The Flex System Iron

  April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the lead story in this issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the basic structure and the high-level sales pitch for the new PureSystem family of converged platforms announced by IBM last Wednesday. That gives you the view from 30,000 feet with a couple of buzz dives down but still well above the tree tops. Now it is time to take a good hard look at the new iron. We’ll start with the Flex System chassis at the heart of the PureFlex and PureApplication machines and the three server nodes that slide into its bays. But

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• IBM Rolls Out iTunes-Like Store For Enterprise Apps

  April 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Part of the IBM PureSystems launch last week was something called PureSystems Centre, an iTunes-like portal where people can browse various enterprise applications that have been vetted to run on the PureFlex and PureApplications systems. You can even click on a “Get it now” button for a quick download and install, just like getting Angry Birds on your iPhone or iPad. While the mobile app store concept doesn’t quite translate to the enterprise space, PureSystems Centre forecasts a more intuitive enterprise app shopping experience, and serves as a vehicle for giving ISVs a seat on IBM’s SmartCloud. Angry Birds Space

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• Some Carrots To Get i5/OS V5 Shops To Move Forward

  April 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT vendors generally use a carrot-and-stick approach to coax customers to move ahead with hardware and software technologies. They don’t do this because they like giving negative reinforcement–not any more than our parents did or we do as parents–but because this is how human beings are resistant to change and need some encouragement to act. IBM has been carrotting and sticking the i5/OS V5R4 customer base for years now, and it is dangling some more carrots. The latest stick, of course, was two months ago when IBM announced that support on i5/OS V5R4, sometimes called IBM i 5.4 by Big

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