• Food Distributor Taps DSC for IBM i HA Service

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Hispanic food distributor Diaz Foods is protecting the uptime of its IBM i-based applications through SafeData HA, a high availability hosting solution offered by Data Storage Corp. Diaz Foods began 21 years ago as a Hispanic food distributor serving a chain of five Diaz Foods stores in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Over the years, the distribution company has expanded its coverage, and today Diaz Foods imports and distributes approximately 6,000 different products to 5,000 customers in 25 eastern states and Sweden. In support of Diaz Foods’ business is a fleet of semi trucks, a quarter of a million square

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• IBS Opens Product Roadmap to Customers

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBS last week unveiled a new initiative called the Enterprise Vertical Leadership Program (EVLP) that’s aimed at giving customers more say in the development of the company’s enterprise software, as well as creating standard versions of the software for major vertical markets. IBS, which develops ERP software for IBM i and Windows servers, is remaking itself in the wake of being bought by Symphony Technology Group in June for $35 million. The Swedish software company’s strength is distribution-focused ERP software for midmarket customers, and its new EVLP initiative will seek to make the most of that. Each customer admitted to

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• Lawson Software Smoothes Employee Exits

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Getting new employees registered and situated with IT systems is critical, but perhaps just as important is the process of offboarding employees who are leaving the organization because they quit, were fired, or were laid off. Lawson Software, which is now an affiliate of Infor, last month unveiled Enwisen Offboarding, a new cloud-based solution that automates administrative tasks associated with the departures of employees. Lawson acquired Enwisen for $70 million late last year, just before Infor swooped in with an acquisition offer ($1.83 billion) that Lawson couldn’t refuse. The deal brought Lawson Enwisen’s cloud-based human resources suite,

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• Linoma: DMZ Gateway Tightens File Transfer Security

  November 15, 2011 Dan Burger

  File sharing among business partners is a common practice. Unfortunately, being careless about it is also a common practice. Security is often imagined to be better than it really is and sometimes not thought of at all. Even companies that are paying attention to this topic–perhaps because it is mandated by one of the regulatory compliance laws–may not have discovered the best practices for secure transfers. Linoma Software recently released a white paper report on the topic of DMZ gateways that provides solid advice on file transfer security. The DMZ (demilitarized zone), also known as a perimeter network, is found

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• A Radical Idea For IBM i Software Pricing

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Lately, I have been thinking a lot about IBM‘s pricing for the IBM i operating system and database. With Big Blue having long since converged its Software Group and its Systems and Technology Group, you would think that the heat would be off in some ways to upgrade hardware and for the company to focus on getting customers current on software. But IBM likes to sell new systems as well as operating systems to customers, and it needs to make money as much as midrange shops don’t like to spend it. I decided to take a look at OS/400,

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• Soltis: We Could Learn From Japan

  November 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  When Frank Soltis retired from IBM three years ago, he wasn’t looking for a rocking chair, a fireplace, and a membership in the Nerdy Book of the Month Club. He’s ridden in too many rodeos to hang up his saddle. The IBM i running on Power Systems is his arena. Soltis continues to travel around the world advocating for the platform and listening to what users and IBM business partners tell him about life on the Smarter Planet. Ever the optimist, Soltis is as reliable and dependable as the midrange servers he helped develop from the days of the System/38

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• The Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine

  November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a whole village of smart people to raise a market because no single human being can calculate all of the angles. That’s why there are laws against selective disclosure in the financial services market, and it is also one of the reasons why newsletters such as this one not only persist in the Internet Era, but have much broader impact than magazines used to in days of old. (But online publishing is, alas, a much more difficult and less profitable business than the magazine salad days of the 1980s and early 1990s.) In any event, it takes smart

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• As I See It: Finding Balance In The Living Years

  November 14, 2011 Victor Rozek

  The shadows are just beginning to crawl down the massive sandstone walls as we struggle into our dry suits and neoprene socks. A thick pair of river shoes and a sturdy walking stick complete our outfits. It’s early morning and still cold as my wife and I prepare to embark on one of the legendary hikes in the National Park System, The Narrows at Zion. Zion is a long canyon carved over the centuries by the Virgin River. You enter the canyon from the south and it gradually constricts as you travel north until the walls close in and the

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• Get Thee To The i Cloud, IBM’s Kugler Says

  November 14, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops should take a long, hard look at cloud computing and see if it makes sense for them, IBM‘s director of business development for the IBM i business, Ari Kugler, said in a webinar last week. During his presentation with IBM i cloud service provider Symmetry, Kugler said that the security and scalability of the IBM i platform, coupled with the price/performance of the Power7 servers, has opened new opportunities for cloud computing. “The time for cloud is now,” he said. Since he joined the IBM Rochester team last year, Kugler has become one of the

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• Reader Feedback On Fun With IBM i Software Pricing

  November 14, 2011 Hey, TPM

  You said: “So, if you have an entry Power 710 or 720 machine, you are paying $7.29 per day to use IBM i 7.1.” I’m based in the United Kingdom, so the numbers are different over here, but how does that stack up compared to the utilities cost per employee, I wonder? And maybe the phone bill? And the cost of IT support staffing to keep everyone up and running? I’m sure I heard that the corporate rate for IT support was horrendous for Windows and it’s not like you can access an IBM i without using Windows these days,

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