• CYBRA Inks Deal with Chinese Government for RFID Project

  September 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

  CYBRA will work with the People’s Republic of China and Key West Technologies to develop “smart” shipping containers that utilize RFID technology, the New York vendor announced last week. As part of the deal, the parties will form a new company called Beijing Smart Shipping Technologies Co. that will develop solutions for improving the tracking of Chinese maritime commerce. Harold Brand, the CEO of Yonkers, New York-based CYBRA, recently traveled to Beijing to officially establish Beijing Smart Shipping Technologies, which is a joint partnership between CYBRA, the Chinese Ministry of Transportation’s Waterborne Transportation Institute (WTI), and Key West Technologies. Beijing

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• Retalix Taps S4i Systems for i OS Electronic Document Management

  September 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Retailers that run Retalix‘s i OS-based ERP system will find it easier to transition to paperless forms as the result of a new partnership Retalix has formed with S4i Systems. As part of the deal, Retalix customers will be able to take advantage of well-documented integration between S4i Systems’ i OS document management software and Retalix’s i OS-based suite of enterprise software, Power Enterprise. Based in Plano, Texas, and Ra’anana, Israel, Retalix develops ERP, CRM, and SCM software used by companies in the retail and distribution industries. Its primary market is serving supermarkets, convenience stores, and foodservice distribution

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• Talend Helps British Housing Authority Integrate Windows and i5/OS Data

  September 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The Accent Group, a British association that provides housing to more than 50,000 residents, is successfully using Talend‘s open-source tools to solve data integration issues stemming from its use of disparate iSeries and Windows servers, Talend announced last week. The Accent Group is a registered social landlord that provides nearly 20,000 homes across the UK through its three registered social landlords, called Accent Foundation, Accent Nene, and Accent Peerless. The organization, which is based in Shipley, West Yorkshire, relies on a mix of IBM iSeries and Windows servers to keep track of business and to meet regulatory obligations. However,

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• IBM to Mothball a Whole Bunch of Stuff with Power7

  September 28, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Apropos of nothing last week, I was ruminating about the planning that AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops need to do as they prepare for the Power7 generation of servers running a patched i 6.1 or the new i 7.1 operating system. IBM has been slowly lifting the veil on the Power7 chips throughout the summer, but hasn’t said much about the systems that will use them. Yes, as The Four Hundred reported back in August, IBM has guaranteed upgrade paths for customers with Power 570 servers (with either Power6 or Power6+ chips) or Power 595 servers (which only

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• IBM, VMware Cooking Up vSphere 4.0 Support for i

  September 28, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that the software engineers at the Power Systems division at IBM and their counterparts at X64 hypervisor juggernaut VMware, are working to get the new ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor–and perhaps many of its vSphere 4.0 extensions–integrated with the i platform. But don’t hold your breath. This will apparently take some time. As all i shops are well aware, Windows is by far the preferred alternative platform at AS/400, iSeries, and i customers, and tends to be used on infrastructure workloads such as Web, print, and file serving, or as application servers with Java

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• What Apple Did That IBM Must Emulate

  September 28, 2009 Martin Fincham

  The IBM i server has an image problem, which is why going on a public relations offensive is the fundamental goal of our iManifest initiative. I am often asked to comment on IBM’s decision to unify the System i (AS/400, iSeries) and System p (Unix) server lines–what we now know as Power Systems. My view is that the resulting engineering efficiencies and economies of scale must bode well for the future of the IBM i platform. The flip-side is a potential loss of identity and seemingly zero marketing effort by IBM to explain what makes a Power Server running

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• As I See It: After You’re Gone (.com)

  September 28, 2009 Victor Rozek

  My wife’s grandmother was born while the Ottoman Empire was still in business–which is to say a long time ago. When she died, she left behind memorabilia from a life that spanned nearly a century. There were photos–boxes of them–some in albums, some loose, some marked, some not, some capturing moments with people known to the family, some showing the smiling faces of strangers. There were letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, mementos, knick-knacks, and memorabilia documenting the lives of four children. It was a mountain of minutia; the physical remnants of a long, full life. Family members were undoubtedly comforted by

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• IBM Says Microsoft ‘Grossly Exaggerated’ Exchange Sales Data

  September 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IBM is once again talking up its Lotus Notes/Domino platform and how it’s doing against Microsoft in the war for collaboration software supremacy. In the latest volley, IBM executives say they are tired of the “hot wind” blowing out of Microsoft headquarters, and say that Notes/Domino is actually “winning” over the Exchange and SharePoint products–a claim that contradicts analyst figures. However, IBM says the analyst figures are tainted because Microsoft doesn’t honestly report sales figures. Divergent viewpoints are nothing new in the ongoing war between Microsoft and its Exchange and SharePoint products on the one hand, and IBM and its

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• ManH Customers Fair Very Well in ‘Retail 100’ List

  September 28, 2009 Alex Woodie

  We take competitive claims by vendors with a grain of salt here at The Four Hundred (see IBM Says Microsoft ‘Grossly Exaggerated’ Exchange Sales Data elsewhere in this newsletter). But we also give credit where credit is due, and from the looks of it, customers of warehouse management system (WMS) software developer Manhattan Associates are disproportionably represented on the Chain Store Age 100 list of the biggest retailers in the United States. For years, Manhattan Associates has been hailed for its “best of breed” WMS, which is designed to help manage their large-scale product storage and distribution activities. And while

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• Dataram Launches SAN Accelerator Appliance

  September 28, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To midrange shops, the name Dataram is pretty much synonymous with clone server main memory that is a heck of a lot less expensive than the main memory that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and others peddle (and grossly profit from) for their boxes. But this week, Dataram is taking the expertise it has in memory and that it gained with solid state disks through and acquisition to launch a caching appliance for storage area networks that can radically boost the performance of servers and cut down on the number of disks that servers need. As

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