• Vision Debuts ‘PowerPacks’ Product Bundles

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions today announced a series of “PowerPacks,” or bundles of software, hardware, and services aimed at specific high availability and systems management requirements for IBM i and AIX Power Systems customers. Besides having a cool name, PowerPacks are meant to reinforce the notion that high availability isn’t a shrink-wrapped piece of software, and that it requires several elements coming together in the proper amounts to make it successful. The Vision PowerPacks are generalized soft bundles that include all the pieces that may be needed around a specific solution in a given geographic region, but which can be configured to

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• WIS:DOM Hooks Up with ACOM

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  WIS:DOM Information Systems, a Nevada-based developer of warehouse and transportation management systems for the System i, has joined the ACOM Solutions reseller program and will soon offer ACOM’s document management software as an integrated option alongside its own products, the companies announced last week. WIS:DOM Information Systems has been developing logistics software for distributors for the last 30 years. Over that period, the company’s WIS:DOM suite, which was developed in LANSA, has evolved to give customers the option of green-screen or Web interfaces. Now, as a result of the partnership with ACOM, WIS:DOM Information Systems is looking to

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• Jack Henry’s Gladiator ESM Goes GA

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates last month announced the general availability of Gladiator Enterprise Security Monitoring (ESM), a real-time security monitoring solution for customers of its i OS-based SilverLake and CIF 20/20 banking applications that looks for, and alerts administrators to, security threats inside and outside the firewall. Gladiator ESM, which first debuted in October, is a hosted security system that’s designed to track security and performance events that might impact the operations of SilverLake and CIF 20/20 applications. As a fully integrated IBM i OS security solution, the offering provides deep coverage of the host operating system, including the

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• Mincron Taps Quadrant for Document Management

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software‘s IntelliChief document management software will be integrated with Mincron Software Systems‘ i OS ERP system, the companies announced last week. As part of the deal, the paperless processing and automated workflow functions of Quadrant’s IntelliChief is now integrated with the latest release of Mincron’s MSS/HD Hardgoods Distribution ERP software. Mincron’s ERP software had already been integrated with older Quadrant products, including the Formtastic and FastFax forms, fax, and e-mail products. The addition of IntelliChief to Mincron’s ERP software will allow MSS/HD users to accomplish several functions directly from their ERP screens, including capturing, retrieving, managing, and

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• CA Plex WebClient Gets a Service Pack

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Partners ADC Austin and Websydian last month shipped the first service pack for a jointly developed Web 2.0-style interface for CA‘s 4GL for System i and Windows, CA Plex. Service pack 1 brings various features, including Unicode support, new AJAX templates, and a Wiki-based developer portal. ADC Austin and Websydian have been providing expert training and add-on products for the CA Plex and CA 2E advanced application development frameworks for many years. Over the last couple of years, the two partners have been working on a new Web product that allows Plex customers to deploy their client-server applications to

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• Ohio Hospital Taps Imprivata for SSO Solution

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Fairfield Medical Center, a 222-bed hospital in central Ohio, has deployed the OneSign single sign-on (SSO) solution from Imprivata to help it address the difficulty that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers had logging onto various computer systems, including McKesson applications and the AS/400, Imprivata announced last month. Prior to the implementation of OneSign SSO, Fairfield Medical Center workers had to remember six to eight different passwords to access critical applications used daily, including McKesson, the AS/400, the Fuji Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS), Healthcare Management Systems‘ Clinical View, and the hospital’s own physicians’ portal. Not surprisingly, the workers

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• Prepare Now for Volatile Supply Chains, IBM Study Says

  March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

  IBM is urging companies to take steps now to deal with the instability of supply chains in the years to come. The recommendations–including more widespread use of RFID and GPS sensors, deeper B2B integration, and better predictive analytics–were included in the Global Chief Supply Chain Officer Study, which details the results of interviews with 400 supply chain executives, and which was released last week. While globalization brings the promise of greater revenue for the manufactures, distributors, and retailers that operate supply chains, increased cash flow comes with a substantial risk of disruption that didn’t exist before. This abstract risk becomes

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• IBM Adds i Shops to Expanded p Shop Trade-In Deal

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM added the i side of the Power Systems house to a long-running trade-in deal it was giving to shops using alternative Unix and proprietary platforms from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu if they acquired a System p 550. In addition, the company tweaked the deal to offer incentives for shops buying Power 520, 550, or 560 servers and also announced discounts on i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 user licensing fees. The original System p trade-in deal was launched in February 2008, just as IBM was putting the dual-core Power6 processors into its System p lineup

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• IBM and Resellers Do the iLoyalty Blitz

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I report in the lead story in this issue, IBM is giving customers using old AS/400 and iSeries machinery trade-in credits on new Power Systems gear and is also cutting the cost of per-user software licensing fees on i5/OS V5R4 and i 6.1 until the end of June. These two deals are, in fact, part of something IBM and its master resellers have cooked up called the iLoyalty Blitz. The basic idea, according to the internal documents that I have been able to get my hands on concerning the iLoyalty Blitz, is to get customers interested in new Power

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• Server Sales Slumped As 2008 Stumbled to the Holidays

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Unfortunately for server makers, the box counters at IDC had a bit less work to do in the fourth quarter of 2008 as the server market took a big dip. The company said last week that it believes that server sales worldwide fell by 14 percent in the final quarter of the year to $13.5 billion. Shipments declined by 12 percent, which means average selling prices were on the decline as companies moved to lighter configurations and vendors cut prices to try to move product. Thanks to the global economic crisis–and yes, I am getting tired of saying that phrase

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