• $12 Billion Bank Picks i OS Core Banking System from Jack Henry

  May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Following an intensive 16-month review process Whitney National Bank, a $12 billion bank based in Louisiana, has decided to install the i OS-based SilverLake application as its core banking platform, SilverLake’s developers, Jack Henry & Associates, announced last week. The selection of a core banking system is one of the biggest decisions a bank can make. To make sure it picked the right system, Whitney National hired a consultant to oversee the selection process, which involved an intensive review of many different banking applications and their technological underpinnings. After careful consideration, Whitney National made the decision to replace its

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• DB2 Connect Gets Better Support for Stored Procedures and Triggers

  May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Developers who use DB2 Connect to access databases running on System i midrange systems and System z mainframes from applications running on Windows, Unix, and Linux systems will gain better support for triggers and stored procedures, among other enhancements, with the latest release of the software, version 9.7, which IBM announced last week. DB2 Connect is a piece of data access middleware that is used to access DB2 databases running on System i and System z servers. The software gives remote applications the capability to create, update, control, and manage DB2 databases running on host systems using a variety of

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• SolarWinds Raises $150 Million in IPO

  May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

  The economy may be in the dumper, and initial public offerings (IPOs) of technology stocks may be a lean trickle of what they used to be. But last week was apparently the right time for SolarWinds to go public. The Texas-based developer of affordable systems management software for mid size businesses raised $151 million on the New York Stock Exchange. SolarWinds is one of a growing number of company that offers a lower-cost alternative to the systems management software from the “Big Four” vendors–BMC Software, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. The vendor, which was founded in

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• Speedware Joins Microsoft AS/400 Program

  May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Speedware is the latest ISV to join the Midrange Alliance Program, Microsoft‘s program for consultants and ISVs who are interested in advocating a .NET approach to modernizing OS/400 programs, and migrating them off the platform to Windows. Speedware is a Montreal, Quebec-based company that has been helping AS/400 shops modernize their applications for the last 10 years. In addition to modernizing their systems, Speedware has developed a collection of tools to help automate the process of migrating AS/400 shops and their RPG code off the proprietary midrange platform entirely. This makes Speedware a good fit for Microsoft’s MAP program,

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• Chips Sliding Away

  May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you look at a photograph of a microprocessor die, doesn’t it always look like a city of some kind where electrons live and work? The L1 and L2 cache memories are perhaps where the electrons live, and they work in the central processing units and floating point units, commuting back and forth as they form the signals that become zeros and ones, like a human wave at a football stadium. Main memory is where the electrons go for weekends, and disk storage is where they go for long vacations. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that when people

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• IBM Launches Smart Cube i and Linux Appliances in the U.S.

  May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After close to two years of development and preliminary marketing in India, IBM‘s Smart Cube application appliances went on sale last Tuesday in its home market in the United States, moving one step closer to a worldwide launch. The Smart Cube appliances, which we have been watching closely since Big Blue first started talking about them a year ago, come in Power-i and X64-Linux flavors and are designed to tap into the Smart Market, a clearinghouse for systems and application software aimed at small and medium businesses. Back in December, I gave you the rundown on the Smart

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• New Data Center, Online Classes Put Omaha College on IT Fast Track

  May 26, 2009 Dan Burger

  Metropolitan Community College serves the greater Omaha, Nebraska, area, but through an online educational program its reach is worldwide. Currently MCC is reinventing its General Information Technology curriculum–which includes specialized course work relating to the IBM Power Systems i platform–and building a technologically advanced data center that will substantially boost career preparation opportunities for a global student body. The innovative methods could well be the future of IT education. In September, when a new two-year educational track called Data Center Management begins, MCC will have a program curriculum based on real world working conditions in a modern data center that

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• As I See It: Expectations of Immediacy

  May 26, 2009 Victor Rozek

  In 1860, a revolutionary multi-species information delivery system was unveiled in St. Joseph, Missouri. Its creators were honest enough to name their enterprise after the harder-working species in the joint venture and called it the Pony Express. The system included 190 stations spaced approximately 10 miles apart–about as far as a horse could run at full gallop–and spanned some 2,000 miles between Missouri and California. Some 183 riders and 400 horses carried mail between St. Joseph and Sacramento, capturing the imagination of a nation eager for more immediate news from its western frontier. Immediacy, however, is contextual and at that

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• Bad Economy Means No Vacation for Many Americans

  May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Memorial Day, the unofficial kick-off for the summer season. But that doesn’t mean everybody will be “going on holiday” this year, as the Europeans like to put it. In the United States, the poor economy is putting the kibosh on many American families’ vacation plans. Some simply can’t afford vacations, some are worried their jobs won’t be there when they return, while still others could go but go but are electing not to because of a newly discovered malady called Guilty Vacation Syndrome (GVS), according to surveys. Every year, Internet job site CareerBuilder conducts a public opinion survey

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• Energy Star Ratings for Servers, Release 1.0

  May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past several years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been working with the server makers of the world to come up with Energy Star ratings–you know, those yellow tags that help you figure out which appliances are energy efficient and therefore save you money over the long run–for servers. Last week, the EPA rolled out the release 1.0 of the Energy Star for Servers specification, which is the first serious step on the long road to doing green analysis on the gear that goes into data centers. As readers of The Four Hundred well know, I am big on

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