• BMC Aims to Bring Virtual Servers Under Control

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Virtualization is a blessing and a curse to IT departments. On the one hand, it allows them to squeeze more capacity out of their existing hardware. On the other, it introduces another layer to manage and exacerbates existing operational shortcomings. Not surprisingly, the big systems management software vendors are scrambling to fill this void in the market, and last week BMC threw its hat into the ring with nine new products for managing various aspects of a virtual environments, including those running on IBM i (formerly i5/OS). Numerous problems are often associated with the use of virtualization, including aggravating server

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• IBM Launches Lotus Protector to Boost E-Mail Security

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  While e-mail remains the original “killer app” and an irreplaceable part of modern business and communication, the amount of spam and malware circulating the e-mail byways makes it more difficult than ever to manage efficiently. To address the headache that is e-mail security, IBM and its Internet Security Systems subsidiary are launching a new line of products called Lotus Protector, the first of which became available last week. IBM and ISS say that the new Lotus Protector line of products will aim to solve common e-mail security problems, but to do so in a Domino-like way that’s familiar to Domino

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• File Upload Feature Added to mrc’s m-Power

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  E-mail is a wonderful technology that has a hundred practical uses. However, when it comes to moving large numbers of files in a simple and timely manner, e-mail and its attachment capability are far from ideal. With the latest release of mrc m-Power Web application development tool, users gain the capability to build file uploading capabilities directly into their m-Power applications. Introduced more than four years ago to supplement its OS/400-only Productivity Series 4GL environment, m-Power is a Web application development environment designed to enable rapid generation of J2EE-based programs, such as Web portals, dashboards, and reports. The software utilizes

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• HarrisData’s ‘Customer Zone’ Written in PHP

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  HarrisData recently launched a new customer-focused Web site that’s aimed at helping its i OS ERP customers–as well as the CRM customers of a subsidiary–voice their concerns and get answers to their questions. The site, called the Customer Zone, is based on open source applications for a Web-based forum and wikis written in PHP, and runs on one of HarrisData’s System i servers. Like most commercial software companies, HarrisData has provided online resources dedicated to assisting its estimated 2,500 customers, who are predominantly mid size companies in the manufacturing and distribution industries. The first-generation Customer Zone was effective at publishing

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• ACOM Makes EDI for SAP Easy

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Businesses that run SAP‘s enterprise software and ACOM Solutions‘s EDI software, called EZConnect, will have an easier time integrating the two products thanks to a new implementation toolkit for SAP from ACOM. EZConnect runs on the Windows platform and provides EDI and XML translation and transformation for a variety of databases, operating systems, and ERP and accounting packages, including those running on the IBM i operating system (formerly OS/400). EZConnect users could previously use the software with ERP software from SAP, but it wasn’t necessarily easy, according to Mark Firmin, vice president of marketing and product management for

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• Food Companies Can Save Millions on Recalls, Lawson Says

  September 9, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A study commissioned by Lawson Software found the food and beverage industry could save millions of dollars by reacting more quickly to product recalls. The recent Salmonella outbreak, which first targeted tomatoes and then settled on peppers as the culprit, may leave you with the impression that the food and beverage industry moves aggressively when there’s a potential health problem. But in fact, there’s a lot of room for improvement, not only from a safety point of view, but from the perspective of profitability, according to Lawson, which commissioned AMR Research to conduct a study called “Traceability in the Food

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• Expanded Power Systems i Boxes on the Horizon?

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a quiet summer in Lake Woebegone, er, rather Rochester, Minnesota, and its Silver Lake. The run from late June through September is traditionally a quiet one, with a few nips and tucks here and there in the Power Systems lineup. But as we all know from reading The Four Hundred, IBM still has a little unfinished Power Systems business for 2008. And the word on the street is that some tweaked gear might be coming down the pike any day now. Heaven only knows if what I am hearing is true, because Big Blue doesn’t usually

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• Entry Power System i Boxes Compete Well with Windows Boxes

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the key reasons why IBM merged the System i and System p product lines this year was to get the i platform more competitive with the rest of the system market. By converging the Power server family and stopping its practice of overcharging System i customers for hardware and software, Big Blue has made the entry Power Systems i Edition lineup–that’s the Power 520 and the BladeCenter S with JS12 blade servers–absolutely competitive with equivalent Windows boxes running online transaction processing workloads. This is the second time in two years, with two generations of products, that this has

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• X64 Servers See Pricing Pressure in Q2, Big Box Sales Grow

  September 8, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The urge to virtualize servers and a resurgence in mainframe sales has helped buoy overall server sales in the second quarter, according to statistics compiled by IDC, which reckons that the corporations and organizations of the world bought an aggregate of $13.9 billion worth of iron. Compared to the prior year’s quarter, sales rose by 6.4 percent, hitting the highest revenue level in a second quarter since 2000, the peak of the dot-com boom. Server shipment growth in the quarter rose by 11.1 percent, driven substantially by 2 million X64 servers that went out the door in the quarter–a

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• The Law of Attraction

  September 8, 2008 Doug Mewmaw

  This year, I was introduced to a concept called the law of attraction. For those who have never heard of the LOA, my laymen’s interpretation of the concept is the following: Based on the science of quantum physics, the law of attraction explains how everything in our universe is made up of energy. The net affect of this energy is that every person has the ability to manifest things into their lives based on the negative or positive energy they project. While the concept boggles my mind, I love the idea that I can manifest success simply by putting myself

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