• Query/400 Alternative from BCD Enhances BI Capabilities

  May 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  Want to see your stock rise? Just design some real-time Web reports, queries, and executive dashboards. Delivering IBM i information to the people who want it–when they want it and in the format they want it–could be very profitable for your career. Business Computer Design, Int’l, better known as BCD, has made some IT department heroes since introducing its query and reporting tool, Clover, in 2005. The latest enhancements to Clover are now available. With Clover 1.6, which was announced at the COMMON 2009 Annual Meeting and Expo two weeks ago, BCD has added the capability to import query

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• Spool File Distribution Gets Smarter with New inFORM Tool

  May 12, 2009 Dan Burger

  Electronic documents and the paperless office make a lot of sense as companies focus on ways to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. Certainly there have been advancements in the technology and there have been success stories touting excellent return on investments. One area of advancement is document distribution, and one vendor with something new to say in this area is inFORM Decisions, a company that just introduced iDocs SmartRouter to its electronic documents suite of products. SmartRouter was designed to improve the processing and distribution of individual spool file pages. It’s a standalone software module that offers testing and

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• Rimini Street Says JD Edwards Support Business Quadrupled Last Year

  May 12, 2009 Alex Woodie

  New software license sales may be down across the board. But that’s not hurting business on Rimini Street, the provider of third-party maintenance and support for JD Edwards and other ERP suites. Last week at the Collaborate 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida, the company announced a quadrupling of JD Edwards-related business, and unveiled a plan to pump millions of dollars more into its JD Edwards business in the hopes of attracting more customers dissatisfied with Oracle‘s support. With Oracle charging annual maintenance fees in mid to high 20 percent range, many JD Edwards shops with old and stable

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• Sundry Spring Power Systems Storage Enhancements

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Along with the April 28 Power6+ enhancements to the entry and midrange server lineup as well as the addition of solid state disks–finally–to the Power Systems lineup, IBM made a slew of storage announcements relating to the Power Systems lineup. In many ways, the announcements had more to do with storage than they did with processors, but this kind of got buried in the zillions of announcements that Big Blue tried to pack in its second Dynamic Infrastructure blitz. I touched on some of these storage announcements back in the April 27 issue, based on the information I could

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• IBM Wheels and Deals on Power 570s and 595s in Q2

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are only three marketing levers in the information technology business: technology, price, and FUD. Without a refresh for top-end Power Systems as part of the April 28 release of the product line, IBM needs to pull one of these three levers, and the technology lever is stuck along with Power6 and Power6+ clock speeds at 5 GHz, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt don’t really work on your own customer base so much as someone else’s. So that leaves price. And late last week, Big Blue pulled the price lever, kicking out two separate promotions, one on Thursday for the

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• Micro Focus to Buy Borland, Compuware Unit for Testing Tools

  May 11, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Micro Focus moved aggressively into the market for testing tools last week with the announcement that it plans to buy Borland Software and the application testing unit of Compuware for a combined $155 million. Micro Focus, which bought System i software developer NetManage a year ago, hopes the acquisitions will give it a good chunk of the fragmented market for testing tools. In making its bids for Borland and Compuware’s testing tool division, Micro Focus is making a bold bet that the market for testing tools, currently about $2 billion globally, is about to expand in a big way. It’s

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• As I See It: Ah, Vacation!

  May 11, 2009 Victor Rozek

  The tiny specs on the massive Navajo-sandstone face are two men. They are hanging from absurdly long ropes, inching downward toward a spot a few hundred feet above the ground. The sun is merciless and they work quickly. One man begins boring a small hole in the sheer rock wall, while the other waits to insert a stick of dynamite. When he lights the long fuse, both men scramble up the ropes as high as they can before the explosion tears a portion of the wall away. The year is 1924. The men have no sophisticated climbing gear, no specialized

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• Middleware Sales Are Slipping, But Could Rebound First

  May 11, 2009 Dan Burger

  Searching for some favorable IT spending-related news in a down economy? Here’s something to get your attention. The application infrastructure and middleware market in 2008 grew 6.9 percent to reach a total of $15.1 billion in sales, according to Gartner statistics. Take into consideration that the increase in 2008 followed a very robust 2007 market that jumped 13.3 percent and totaled $14.1 billion. And the 2007 increase was piggybacked on two previous years of double-digit growth. Although no longer riding such a prodigious winning streak, the staying power of this segment of the software space is indicative of the strength

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• Power-BladeCenter Combo Gets Tweaks for i Shops

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the recent batch of Power Systems announcements on April 28, IBM made some important changes to the hardware and software relating to Power-based blade servers and the BladeCenter chassis that makes that subset of the product line usable by the i shops. First and most importantly, the Virtual I/O Server that runs inside of a PowerVM logical partition and acts as a virtualized interface to disk and tape controllers and their media for the Power-based JS12, JS22, JS23, and JS43 blade servers can now support virtual tape. What this means, in something akin to plain English, is

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• Data Integration Specialist XAware Acquired by Sparxent

  May 11, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When XAware, a maker of a Java-based, graphical data integration tool, took the open source plunge with its eponymous product in November 2007, it did not do so to gussy itself up to be acquired. But the vibrancy of XAware’s open source development and distribution effort and its growing customer base were undoubtedly key reasons why Sparxent, a relatively new company that seems to have been established to buy up IT companies last August, bought XAware last week. Sparxent, which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, was founded in August 2008, right at the beginning of the

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