• Profound Touts Native Modernization Chops in Code Shoot Out

  December 13, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic was one of six vendors of IBM i application modernization tools that participated in the recent Application Modernisation Code Shoot-Out, which took place at a user group conference in the U.K. What made Profound’s solution stand out was the capability to completely modernize the UI screens in HTML, and to do so using “native” IBM i technologies, the company says. The Shoot Out, which was hosted last month at the COMMON GB event put on by National iSystems User Group (NiSUG), pitted six vendors and their application modernization tools against one very tired 5250 application that was in

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• ACOM Launches EZPaySuite

  December 13, 2011 Alex Woodie

  ACOM Solutions this month began shipping EZPaySuite, a new collection of software that helps organizations implement electronic payment processing across the automated clearinghouse (ACH) network. The software incorporates a self-service Web portal, includes the capability to print MICR checks, supports positive pay, and works across multiple platforms. ACOM is no stranger to electronic payment processing. For years, the Long Beach, California, company has developed EZPayManager, a Windows-based software product that provides an onramp to ACH processing, supports payee self-service registration, and integrates with ACOM’s line of document and content management tools for organizations using IBM i servers and other platforms.

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• Infor Reaches Out to SAP with ION Connector

  December 13, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Infor yesterday unveiled a software connector that integrates its Infor10 ION middleware with ERP systems from SAP. It also revealed plans to support Oracle applications with Infor10 ION during 2012. With dozens of acquisitions under its belt, Infor has had to get proficient at enterprise application integration just to allow its own applications to communicate with each other. Now it’s expanding the work it’s done internally, with ION, to third-party applications. Infor says that its new SAP connector (officially called the Infor10 ION Connector for SAP) will soon be available. Initially, it will work with three Infor10 offerings, including

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• MDS Adds New Fraud Detection Features to Lavastorm Analytics

  December 13, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The growing prevalence of fraud in the telecommunications space, such as identity spoofing and cloned SIM cards, has prompted MDS Lavastorm Analytics to beef up its analytic power tool with new fraud-fighting capabilities. Lavastorm is a powerful analytic application that allows users to model, understand, and control how business processes and data flow through disparate systems in corporate environments. It’s commonly used in the telecommunications space, including by its sister company, Martin Dawes Systems, which runs a major IBM i billing system in an outsourced manner for clients in Europe. While Lavastorm has long been used to detect the

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• Santa Faces Daunting Supply Chain Challenge

  December 13, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Your friendly neighborhood UPS driver works extra hard during the holidays, especially the week before Christmas, during which UPS expects to deliver 120 million packages. Big Brown may love and excel at logistics, but frankly it doesn’t have anything on Santa Claus, as the old elf is self-tasked with delivering a supply chain miracle this year–delivering presents to 1.9 billion children, in a single night. The legend of Santa Claus is well-documented in hundreds of books and stories, but thanks to some numerical figuring by the ERP experts at Sciquest, we can put Santa’s work into the proper logistical

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• Get With The Program

  December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I spend a lot of time thinking about hardware and systems software because, quite frankly, that is what I get paid to do in addition to being something that I am personally interested in given the fact that systems quite literally run the world. But a system, that magical combination of processors, storage, and the code necessary to make it usable by business logic encoded in higher-level languages, is perfectly useless without applications. It is not lost on any of you, I know full well, that the computer that this newsletter is dedicated to was launched as the Application System/400,

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• Tape Can Still Close The Backup Window

  December 12, 2011 Dan Burger

  Every aspect of your business is bombarded by the message that modernization is the key to happiness. IT is just one piece of the puzzle. And even that puzzle has dozens of pieces that require decisions on whether to replace or refurbish. Replacing may result in the biggest benefits, but often there are no guarantees, particularly if what’s in place is working. Finding what’s not working is the first step and then deciding if you can improve what you have without replacing investments in hardware and infrastructure is the next step. Let’s take storage for example. Disk-based backup is one

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• IBM Off To The Races With New Memory Tech

  December 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The chip heads at IBM‘s Research and Microelectronics divisions have had a busy week, showing off their new memory and computing toys at the IEEE’s International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, D.C., last week. Some of the chip technology that Big Blue was showing off to its peers is far out into the future, but it could end up in systems sooner than you might think. As you old AS/400 shops are well aware, IBM used to make its own memory chips and disk drives for its systems and that memory was designed and fabbed in the same Rochester,

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• As I See It: Looking Ahead

  December 12, 2011 Victor Rozek

  Twain and Corleone, the unsung duo of economic prognostication, aptly describe two probable scenarios for IT in the coming year. One prospect is hopeful and the other is cautionary. One provides reason for celebration, the other frustration. In one scenario, we are the masters of our fate, in the other, not so much. “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”–Mark Twain “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”–Michael Corleone First the good news. Who knew that Sam Clemens was a closet economist? Indeed, predictions of economic collapse appear to be premature. The

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Maltese Logon

  December 12, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  If your apps all work through a web browser or are written in agnostic Java, relax. Don’t bother reading this. But if Windows grips some of your apps, as it does at most IBM i shops, there are things going on you had better watch. Until recently, Windows dominated client environments. Not anymore. ARM-based devices running iOS (the Apple operating system, not the IBM midrange one) or Android or BlackBerry OS outsell X86 machines running Windows. Windows on ARM won’t close the gap. Windows 9 might run mainly on cloud servers with island clients a second thought. When you say

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