• Desktop OS Sales Outpace Servers in 2010; IBM i Shows Growth

  May 9, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It doesn’t take any insight at all to figure out who is the largest operating system supplier in the world. It is Microsoft, of course. But who is number two, three, and four? And who is the fastest growing maker of operating systems? The answers might surprise you. Through the magic of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems last January, Oracle was able to grow its operating system revenues by 7,683 percent, to $780 million, making it the fastest grower. Of course, Oracle had only a tiny OS business, selling a clone of Red Hat‘s Enterprise Linux. Gartner said

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• Will Red Hat Cloudware Come to Power-Based IBM i Clouds?

  May 9, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Calling Red Hat a commercial Linux distributor, as I commonly do, is no longer a sufficient title for the Linux operating system giant. With the acquisition of JBoss and Qumranet, Red Hat has really become a systems software supplier, giving companies everything they need to build a software stack on X64, Power, or mainframe systems excepting a database. Starting later this year, that will also include cloud management tools as well as features to manage the deployment of applications. At its Red Hat Summit last week, the company announced two new products: CloudForms and OpenShift. The former is a set

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• As Growth Stalls, Micro Focus Gets Takeover Attention

  May 4, 2011 Alex Woodie

  A private equity firm is rumored to be eyeing Micro Focus International as an acquisition target. The British software company, which is suffering from flat sales and a rash of executive departures, last week confirmed speculation in the press that it has been approached about selling the company, but declined to provide specifics. Micro Focus owns the popular RUMBA emulator, but most of its revenue comes from COBOL tools for mainframes. Micro Focus was the subject of takeover speculation in early March, when IBM and SAP were rumored to be looking at the company. Micro Focus denied the rumors, even

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• Townsend Automates IBM i Encryption with ‘Field Proc’

  May 3, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Implementing field-level database encryption on the IBM i server is about to get a whole lot easier, according to the folks at Townsend Security Solutions. The company today is announcing the general availability of AES/400 version 6, which adds new features that automate the implementation of encryption and decryption processes with DB2/400 data using the so-called “field procedure” function that was released with IBM i 7.1. Implementing field- or column-level encryption on DB2/400 was a long and painful task prior to the release of the FIELDPROC exit point with IBM i 7.1 a year ago. Due to intricacies of

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• RPG Skills, LANSA Tools, Plays Well for Music Industry Licensing Company

  May 3, 2011 Dan Burger

  RPG programmers often have to deal with cobwebs and skeletons in the closet. Their companies have them locked away doing maintenance work on legacy code. Days are filled with routine tasks to keep applications up and running and repairing breaks in code when things go wrong. Frequently their knowledge and skills are vastly underutilized. At the Harry Fox Agency (HFA), a couple of IT managers decided the RPG resources were far too great to squander. The development team at the nation’s leading provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry rose to the occasion when the

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• InterForm A/S Gets a Boost from Infor Partnership

  May 3, 2011 Alex Woodie

  InterForm A/S is getting a big chance to show its chops in the U.S. market for output management software as the result of an expanded partnership with ERP giant Infor. The deal involves replacing an outdated and unsupported output management system that’s installed with one of Infor’s IBM i-based applications. While InterForm isn’t well known in the United States and Canada, its software–which is marketed in North America under the name ArtForm for copyright reasons–is actually used fairly extensively. InterForm COO Peter Sørensen chalks up a large part of that success to InterForm’s 25-year history developing output management software

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• Halcyon Launches SLA Reporting Tool, iPad Interface

  May 3, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Halcyon Software is using this week’s COMMON conference to launch several new products and updates to existing ones. Among the new offerings is the Advanced Reporting Suite, which tracks the performance of IBM i and Windows servers and allows administrators to keep on top of service level agreements (SLAs). The British company also unveiled a new iPad interface for its core operations system console, bolstered the performance of its Spool File Manager, and released Snapshot version 11. The new Advanced Reporting Suite is a Windows-based tool that tracks the performance of IBM i and Windows server environments. The product covers

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• COMMON Expo: Your Source for Free Stuff

  May 3, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Nearly 100 IBM i vendors will be displaying their wares in the exposition portion of this week’s COMMON conference in Minneapolis. For some attendees, the expo is a place to learn about the latest IBM i solutions from the vendors themselves. For others, the vendor booths represent an excellent opportunity to stock up on free pens, toys, squeakers, jumpy things, and of course food. This year, many vendors will be giving away high-end devices, like iPads and Kindles, which is sure to attract the attendees. No fewer than four vendors contacted by IT Jungle confirmed they will be holding drawings

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• JDA MMS Users Get Incentive to Go Paperless

  May 3, 2011 Dan Burger

  Building on its existing partnership with JDA Software Group, IntelliChief has enhanced its content management system based on tighter integration with JDA’s i OS-based Merchandise Management System (MMS). This latest development brings JDA users electronic document management capabilities directly from their MMS screens–adding convenience and increased efficiency to processes like invoice routing, approvals, and paperwork filing. IntelliChief vice president of sales and marketing Michael Rooney said in a statement the improvements in integration and implementation is expected to result in more JDA users converting from paper-based to digital-based systems. Rooney cited the capability to search and retrieve documents directly

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• Infor to Consolidate Distribution ERP Suites

  May 3, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Infor is consolidating its various ERP suites for the distribution industry to two main products, the company announced recently. The IBM i platform will be represented with Infor Distribution Enterprise i, which is based on the A+ product that Infor obtained with its 2004 acquisition of daly.commerce. Eventually, the company will merge the two distribution ERP suites to a single product with a common code base. Infor chief strategy officer Bruce Richardson discussed the future of the company’s ERP development strategy in a recent posting on his blog, The View From Inside. According to Richardson, the company is currently

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