• Inovis to Support XBRL with BizManager

  September 23, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Inovis announced last week plans to support a new SEC mandate requiring public companies to file financial data and EDGAR filings using Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The Atlanta, Georgia, company plans to support all of its BizManager products, including BizManager400, by the SEC’s deadlines for XBRL compliance in 2009 and 2010. The entire financial information supply chain is expected to benefit by the standardization of SEC filings via XBRL. According to Inovis, whose B2B software supports EDI standards, including AS2 and ebXML, users would benefit from improved efficiency in preparation and submission of SEC filings; increased transparency of filings;

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• UST Global Highlights Consulting Work at Countrywide

  September 23, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Countrywide Financial, the mortgage loan giant based in Simi Valley, California, has long been regarded as one of the largest users of IBM Power Systems technology. When it was time to modernize the applications and begin the transition to a service oriented architecture (SOA), Countrywide brought in UST Global, an IT outsourcing firm that recently launched a new IT consulting division. When it was founded in Laguna Hills, California, in 1998, UST Global was known as US Technology, and focused largely on the market for business process outsourcing (BPO) among the Global 2000 companies. Today, UST Global still maintains

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• IBM Gives i5/OS V5R4 a New Name–i 5.4

  September 23, 2008 Alex Woodie

  What’s in a name? Apparently not much, if you’re IBM, which now seems intent on rewriting history by eliminating some references to the i5/OS operating system from its Web site. In recent months, IBM has modified its Global Solutions Directory Web page to align with the company’s latest naming strategy for the server product from Rochester, Minnesota. It used to be that you could see which third-party applications were certified to run on i5/OS V5R4, which was the release of the operating system before i 6.1 was launched earlier this year, and the only operating system to ever be

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• The Uberating System

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A good question, posed by English poet Robert Browning. I don’t know if the data center can qualify as a kind of heaven, though I do suspect that if there is a heaven, the temperature is always perfect, and I can imagine the faint humming of the workings of the Universe being audible. Anyway, you can’t blame IT vendors for having their reach exceed their grasp, which happens all the time. This is, apparently, how progress is made–through stretching. Sometimes the truth, sometimes our minds. Sometimes

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• IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re almost into the fourth quarter and just finishing up the last couple of business days in the third quarter, and that means IBM is looking to cut some deals on CPU cores and i5/OS licenses to make some dough out of the System i installed base. Let’s cover the hardware deals first. Last week, IBM announced a promotion that will run until December 31 that gives shops with System i 550, 570, and 595 servers rebates on processor activations on Power5 and Power5+ processors that are already inside their boxes and in a latent state. (IBM calls this capacity

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• Need to Cut Costs? Midrange Shops Should Do ERP Well

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a toughening economic environment, which many companies and individuals are facing these days in the Western economies, there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the stress. One of them is to look around to try to cut personnel, to streamline processes to try to cut costs for manufacturing or distribution of a product, or to argue harder for discounts from suppliers. While IT projects often are the first things to get cut, maybe the smart thing to do is to invest in a better ERP system. Or be grateful for the good one you might be lucky or

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• Mad Dog 21/21: You Can Teleworker, But Who Will Listen?

  September 22, 2008 Hesh Wiener

  As you read this on your display screen, you are a potential (if not actual) teleworker. Maybe you’re in the office, but you could as easily be far away. In principle, people in many jobs could work outside the office, and, with gasoline at a buck a quart, it’s no longer hypothetical. These days, teleworking might be practical not only for employees but also for employers. It is a topic that requires fresh scrutiny, some new technology, and appreciation of its roots, which go back 2,500 years. The possibility that people whose work is based on using a computer could

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• Oracle Soars in Fiscal Q1, But Applications Sales Soften

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems and application software maker Oracle reported its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 last week, and both sales and profits were up smartly in the quarter. But, somewhat ominously and not really all that surprisingly given the jumpiness in the world’s economies, sales of new application software licenses were soft. In the three months ended August 31, Oracle’s overall sales rose by 17.7 percent to $5.3 billion, and net income shot up by 28.2 percent to just under $1.1 billion. It would be hard to find a company, large or small, that did better in a

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• Reader Feedback on IT Jungle Shutting Down Non-AS/400 Newsletters

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, my decision to shut down IT Jungle’s mainframe, Linux, Windows, and Unix newsletters took many of you by surprise. No surprises there. I would like to thank the many, many people who called, instant messaged (yes, a lot of you are online with me every day), or sent email, commending our efforts to stay in the AS/400 game while letting me make a decent living (so I hope) by having two jobs. It shouldn’t take two jobs, but that’s life in general and my life in particular. Not all of the feedback was positive, of course. This first bit

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• IBM Kills Free Blade Deal for i Shops, Discounts Blade Chassis and Switches

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since October 2007, IBM has been offering free BladeCenter blade server configurations to i shops, particularly for those acquiring System i iron or upgrades to it. In March, IBM tweaked this deal, making the spending limits on new or upgraded i machines larger and requiring customers to buy more features to get their free BladeCenter H chassis with a few HS21 Xeon-based blades inside. Last week, IBM killed off that deal, and replaced it with a nominal Web discount on switches used in BladeCenter boxes as well as on the chasses themselves. The Web discount deal is not limited strictly

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