• Infor Gets Ready for System i Conference at Opryland

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  In two weeks, Infor will be holding its 2011 System i User Conference at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. The three-day show will feature educational sessions for users of BPCS, MAPICS, and System21, as well as a solutions expo and networking opportunities for Infor customers. Also, Infor is hosting a user conference for its Infinium customers this week. The focus of 2011 System i User Conference (Infor deliciously refuses to abide by IBM’s 2009 name change) is providing education for Infor’s three primary IBM i-based suites. These include Infor10 ERP iEnterprise (LX) (formerly called Infor ERP LX and

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• iWay Gets Into Big Data

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  iWay Software last week unveiled enhancements to its data management products aimed at helping customers get the most out of their big stores of data. At the heart of iWay’s “big data” push is Data Quality Center, a Java-based tool designed to cleanse, standardize, and validate data as it sits in transactional and analytical applications, and when it’s pulled out for use in integration projects and system migrations. iWay has updated DQC to be able to handle the rigors fixing data quality problems in real time. The company redesigned the tool’s database layer and enhanced its matching engine, which improved

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• IBM Updates Cognos BI Software

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled a new release of its flagship Cognos Business Intelligence software. Version 10.1.1 delivers several small enhancements, including support for iPad clients, better integration with third-party OLAP tools, and more setup options in the Cognos visualization and authoring tools. IBM’s Cognos BI is a sprawling suite of BI tools with dozens of components that run the gamut from reporting and dashboards to scorecards, what-if analysis, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, and online analytical processing (OLAP). The software doesn’t run on the IBM i server (its server components require Unix, Linux, or Windows), but plenty of IBM i shops

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• SEEBURGER Unites MFT and Integration Suites

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The German software company SEEBURGER AG last week unveiled a new release of its managed file transfer (MFT) solution. The company says it’s made SEE MFT an integrated component of its Business Integration Suite, thereby giving customers a single product for sharing supply chain data, such as EDI and AS2 files, alongside file types not used to transmit supply chain data, such as PDF or PowerPoint. SEEBURGER has a long history in the EDI field, having launched its first EDI offering for the automotive industry in 1986. Over the years, the company developed a close relationship with German ERP powerhouse

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• IBM Updates Service Delivery Manager

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced a new release of Service Delivery Manager for Power Systems, a PowerVM-based product that helps Power Systems and X86 customers provision and manage virtual operating system instances. With version 7.2.2, the offering gets enhancements in the area of monitoring and usage metering. IBM bills Service Delivery Manager as a cloud management system that’s geared toward helping customers squeeze the most virtual bang for their physical buck. The primary task of the software (which is available in Power Systems and X86 flavors) is automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of AIX, Linux, and Windows (sorry, no IBM i)

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• Contractors Used by 70 Percent of IT Businesses, Survey Says

  September 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Independent contractors have been an intrinsic part of the IT industry since the IT industry was invented. But according to a recent survey of CompTIA members by tech staffing firm OnForce, nearly 70 percent of companies in the IT business use independent contractors when they don’t have enough full-time staff to do the work. While the country as a whole suffers through economic stagnation and a high unemployment rate, the situation is a bit brighter in the IT industry, where the unemployment rate is 4.5 percent, according to a recent blog post by CompTIA’s Jim Staats, who counted 856,000

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• Windows/400: Windows On Power Systems, Take Five

  September 19, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A moment of indignation on behalf of midrange shops that are up to their necks in both IBM i and Windows: Why on earth does the ARM architecture get a version of Windows ahead of the Power server platform? What’s more important: Hundreds of thousands of customers who spend billions of dollars on expensive systems, or tens of millions of consumers who spend billions of dollars on smartphones and tablets that have hardly any profit margin? Why is the latter billion better than the former, BillG? Way back when 20 years ago, when I still didn’t have very much hair

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• IBM Refocuses Its Application Reputation

  September 19, 2011 Dan Burger

  The question is often asked, “What is IBM doing for the small to midsize businesses that run on the IBM i platform?” From a numbers standpoint, this is the largest segment of customers Big Blue can claim under a single brand, with 95 percent of the IBM i installed base being SMBs. IBM built the System/3X and AS/400 business over three decades, and it did so with application software. It has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade, and now the company has seen that to keep and expand this business, it needs application software. With this strategy,

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• European Power Deal Tweaked, Zero Percent Financing Down Under

  September 19, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems business is humming along relative to other Unix and proprietary platforms, but success for IBM is measured relative to itself, quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year and at the bottom line. And thus Big Blue has doubled down on a Power Systems rebated deal designed to get European companies off old iron and onto new, as well as offering financing deals across its server and storage line in Australia and New Zealand to attract some business. Under the 2011 Power Trade In Program NE IOT, IBM is offering customers who have old RS64, PowerPC, Power2, Power3, Power4, Power4, Power5, Power5+,

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Goodbye Kitty

  September 19, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  You may remember the movie Apotheker Now, or perhaps the novel on which it was based, Bartz of Darkness. The story, as you undoubtedly recall, concerns Fulton J. Wintel, sent into the wilderness by the greedy tyrant Leopold 2.0 to bring back whacko Kemeny Kurtz. Wintel finds Kurtz, who soon expires, muttering, “The oracle, the oracle.” The tale portrays the underside of Silicon Valley during the Doofus Era, when companies dexterously developing and exploiting new technologies overwhelmed those that slipped even once, or looked like they might have. It’s the whacko season. Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo are beset by

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