• Application Maintenance Becomes a Service at vLegaci

  June 23, 2009 Dan Burger

  Before the recession, organizations looked to cut costs by extending equipment upgrade cycles and trimming staff. Globalization increased competitiveness and then the recession intensified the requirements for success. In IBM AS/400 (iSeries and System i) IT departments, this plays out in decisions to delay system upgrades and make staff reductions, just like other departments are faced with similar situations. Given this reality, Steve Kilner at vLegaci, believes he has a tool that fits in well. Kilner, who is president of vLegaci, has a product called Codelyzer. Its introduction was covered in Four Hundred Stuff in an article titled “Codelyzer

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• Companies Put PHP to Work With BCD’s WebSmart

  June 23, 2009 Robert Gast

  The benefits of Web-based applications for purposes such as online shopping and order entry can reduce personnel costs and other bottlenecks when working with suppliers and customers. In IBM i shops, the interest in PHP has been surprisingly vigorous. Two companies that recently went live with IBM i PHP applications are Midwest Fuel Injection (MWFI) and American Foods Groups (AFG), both of which chose WebSmart PHP from Business Computer Design. Interestingly, the technicians responsible for PHP development at each company have very different programming backgrounds. MWFI’s Tony Kudrys has lots of Web experience but only basic IBM i knowledge,

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• ASCI Adds i OS Support to Job Scheduler

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Advanced Systems Concepts (ASCI) last week announced that it has added support for four operating systems with its cross-platform job scheduling software, called ActiveBatch Job Scheduling and Workload Automation, including IBM i, Hewlett-Packard‘s NonStop Kernel, SuSE Linux, and SCO Group‘s SCO Unix operating environments. Advanced Systems Concepts is a software development company based in Morristown, New Jersey. It’s not to be confused with the Chicago, Illinois-based Advanced Systems Concepts that Help/Systems bought in October 2006. The company says its customers have installed its products 200,000 times in 36 countries around the world, including about 1,300 installations for ActiveBatch.

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• Kisco’s i OS Twitter Product Gets Two-Way Communications

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Kisco Information Systems last week unveiled an update to SNDTWEET, its novel utility that turns the social networking tool into a communication and system management tool for the System i. Now, with version 1.03, Kisco is enabling customers to reply back to the System i using Twitter, instead of just enabling the System i to send “tweets” through the service. In just a week and a half, thanks to a contentious election in Iran and the crackdown on mainstream media that has followed, Twitter has gone from being the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the social networking movement

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• Magic Delivers Stronger .NET Client with uniPaaS 1.8

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Magic Software yesterday launched uniPaaS version 1.8, a new edition of its framework for developing and running rich Internet applications that live in the cloud, in the customer’s data center, or a combination of the two. With this release, the Irvine, California, software company is offering new integration points with Microsoft .NET, which Magic says will enrich the user experience, particularly for Windows Mobile apps. First unveiled in early 2008 as G5, uniPaaS is Magic’s new flagship platform for rich Internet applications and the software as a service (SaaS) delivery mechanism. It borrows heavily from the rapid application development expertise

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• Bytware Updates Anti-Virus to Support Domino 8.5

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  System i shops that rely on Bytware‘s StandGuard Anti-Virus software to protect their i OS and Domino environments from becoming infested with Windows viruses and other pieces of malicious code will be happy to hear that the software vendor now supports Domino 8.5, which was released by IBM last month. For the last six years, Bytware has been developing and selling StandGuard Anti-Virus for the IBM i (OS/400) platform. While the Power Systems (eServer iSeries) platform is generally regarded to be highly resistant to security threats that commonly afflict the Windows operating system, the i OS server can be

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• Cleo Adds Automation to B2B Software

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Companies that use Cleo Communications‘ VersaLex software to drive B2B transactions among System i, Unix, Windows, and Linux servers will gain new automation capabilities with version 4.1 of the product, which was announced last week. VersaLex is the core Java-based communications engine that’s behind several products used to send and receive EDI documents over the Internet using standards such as AS2, AS3, ebXML, HTTP/S, FTP/S, and WebSphere MQ. Other products that use this core engine (and are members of Cleo’s VersaLex Suite) include VersaLex Trader (VLTrader), a managed file transfer solution; LexiCom a secure file transfer agent; VersaLex Proxy

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• Rational and Happy: IBM Wins Evans’ Development Tool Survey Again

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IBM‘s Rational products are happier with their integrated development environments (IDEs) than customers of other development toolmakers, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and a handful of other vendors, according to a new report from Evans Data. It was the second straight victory in the annual survey for IBM’s Rational tools, and the third in four years. For the last four years, Evans Data has surveyed scores of developers across the land to get an idea of what they’re working on, what tools they like, and what they don’t like. Evans Data used to call this

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• AS/400: Still Kicking After 21 Years

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400, in its current incarnation as the Power Systems server platform running the i 6.1 operating system and the DB2 for i integrated database, turns 21 this week. I think that means it can finally buy hard liquor and have a stiff drink, which is something that such a venerable platform as the AS/400 certainly deserves. I think it is safe to say that you old timers, the AS/400 faithful who predate whippersnappers like me (with only 20 years in the market) all need a good stiff drink, with the global economy in the state that it is in

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• Power Systems i Weather Report: Partly Cloudy Soon

  June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems i platform is going into the clouds. As part of its CloudBurst cloud infrastructure launch last week, IBM said that it will eventually build cloud setups, both for sale by IBM to run inside corporate data centers as well as those it runs with rented capacity, based on its X64, Power, and mainframe iron. As you might expect, given the buying proclivities of the relatively few cloud customers today, IBM’s CloudBurst products are starting out on X64 iron. Everybody in the server racket wants to make a big deal about cloud computing these days, but the cloud

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