• ACOM Delivers a Web Log of E-Mail and Fax Activity

  December 8, 2009 Alex Woodie

  ACOM Solutions last week launched a new product called WebView that helps users manage the e-mail and fax functionality of other ACOM products, EZeMail/400 and EZFax/400. In effect, the browser-based WebView functions as a log of e-mail and fax distribution, and also allows users to resend documents using other means of distribution. WebView was created because some ACOM users had difficulty telling whether important faxes or e-mails had been sent via EZFax/400 or EZeMail/400, two i OS-based extensions of ACOM’s core EZPrint/400 (now EZeDocs/400) offering that the company launched eight years ago this month. User problems began with having

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• iMessaging Integrates i OS Application with Nortel Call Center Software

  December 8, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Companies that use the Symposium call center software from Nortel now have an easier way to achieve integration with i OS applications. Last week, iMessaging Solutions announced a package of software and services that allows its iNspire telephony software to integrate with Symposium. Nortel bills its Symposium Call Center Server as an advanced and scalable platform for automating the distribution of incoming calls in a contact center. The software makes organizations more efficient by guiding callers through a “phone tree” to determine the purpose of a call, and then routing the call to the customer service representatives (CSRs) with the

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• Power Systems i: Thinking Inside the Box

  December 7, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re coming to the end of what has probably been one of the longest years in the decade and the beginning of a new decade at the same time. Now is a natural time for us to review the state of the AS/400 platform, now cumbersomely known as the Power Systems server running IBM i 6.1. I am going to take my time and think this through, so I hope you are in no hurry. I have been hurried enough this year for an entire lifetime, and this is a topic that takes some slow thought. That said, it is

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• Higher ASPs Help the Server Racket Perk Up a Little

  December 7, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Virtualization and the heavier server configurations that are necessary to take advantage of it are simultaneously helping and hurting the server racket. According to statistics released last week by Gartner, worldwide server revenues continued to slide in the third quarter, falling by 15.5 percent to $10.7 billion as shipments fell by 17.1 percent to 1.92 million machines. This is a far cry better than the more than 30 percent drop in both sales and shipments in the second quarter of this year, and represents the first time in five quarters that there was sequential growth in server sales. The

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• Smart Market ISVs Find Few Leads in Early Going

  December 7, 2009 Dan Burger

  Most of us can agree that for IBM to be successful in the midrange it will have to get across the idea that it is a better application company than its competitors, the primary one being Microsoft. For a company that is entrenched in the enterprise market, like Big Blue currently is, working in the midrange presents a challenge. To take on that challenge, IBM has a program called Smart Business. ISVs, particularly the application software companies, will play a big role in this. In the IBM i environment, approximately 80 percent of the customer base fits comfortably in

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• As I See It: Al and Me

  December 7, 2009 Victor Rozek

  Twice I’ve traveled to Portland, Oregon, to see Al Gore and twice I’ve been punked. The first time was 16 years ago when he and Bill Clinton presided over the Northwest Forest Summit. The conference was organized because environmentalists were successfully blocking timber sales in court. The Forest Service had been repeatedly found guilty of what one federal judge called “systematic and deliberate” violations of law. The fact that the agency was peppered with former timber industry executives probably didn’t help its cause. Now, the two highest elected officials in the land were in Portland to hammer out a plan

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• Vision Sees Positive Trends for HA/DR in Second ‘State of Resilience’ Report

  December 7, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Power Systems users are becoming more stringent over how much time it should take them to recover data following a disaster, according to Vision Solutions‘ second annual “State of Resilience” report, which the vendor officially unveils tomorrow. That’s the good news. The bad news is that organizations are still not prepared to actually recover as quickly as they want, says Vision, which also tried to shed light on IBM i and AIX usage in Power Systems shops as part of the year-long study. In a perfect world, everybody would have zero tolerance for lost data and downtime as the

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• Reader Feedback on A New Look for the COMMON Session Grid

  December 7, 2009 Dan Burger

  A long-time supporter of COMMON and the AS/400 market had some more input on the changes coming at the user group, which The Four Hundred detailed last week. Hi, Dan: I need to correct an error in your COMMON article. Speakers are the least affected by COMMON’s recent change to volunteer compensation, not the most affected as you stated. In the past, they needed to give four sessions to earn a full refund of the registration amount. It’s now five sessions. Where a small number of speakers have been hit is that COMMON used to pay additional compensation for

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• U.S. Unemployment Rate Drops a Bit, IT Does OK

  December 7, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Department of Labor Statistics put out is monthly report on the jobs situation in the United States last Friday morning, and the good news is that the economy shed only 11,000 jobs, compelling the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate to drop by two-tenths of a percent, to a flat 10 percent. Economists had been projecting somewhere around 125,000 jobs to be chopped, so this was some much-needed good news on the economic front. Generally speaking, the BLS, which is the part of the Department of Labor tasked with counting everything having to do with the working person (except the number

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• IBM Crams Data Centers Into Shipping Containers, Too

  December 7, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The idea of putting servers, storage, and networking gear into metal shipping containers and linking them together into a data center cluster is not a new idea–Sun Microsystems was the first to propose the idea back in October 2006–but it is catching on enough that IBM is endorsing the concept and shipping a product. Big Blue was showing off its riff on the containerized data center, which is called the Portable Modular Data Center, at the 28th annual Gartner Data Center Conference, in Las Vegas, last week. And as you can see, it is a shipping container with a

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