• ASNA Helps Steel Company Off Big Iron

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Industrial Steel Treating Company (IST) is happy with its new Windows-based shop floor software, which it recently moved from IBM i to Windows with a little help from Amalgamated Software of North America (ASNA). According to a recent ASNA case study on the migration project written by Tom Stockwell, IST had gotten its money’s worth out of its custom shop floor program, which was originally written in the 1980s in RPG II to run on an S/36 minicomputer. But the time had come for the company to move forward, which meant moving the software to a platform that was cheaper

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• Vegas Casino Expands IBM i Footprint

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The 300-room Silverton Casino Hotel in Las Vegas picked the IBM i-based Lodging Management System (LMS) from Agilysys to streamline and automate various aspects of its business, the software company announced last month. The Silverton Casino Hotel was already running Agilysys’ IBM i-based inventory package, called the Stratton Warren System (SWS). When it came time to select a new core application to run the hotel side of the business, the company naturally checked out SWS’ neighbor in the Agilysys stable, LMS. “We have used the Agilysys Stratton Warren System for many years and have been impressed with the company’s service

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• EVault Scales Its Backup Appliances Up and Down

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  EVault‘s line of backup appliances got a makeover recently, including a new high-end device that holds 38 TB of data, and a new low-end device that starts at a mere 500 GB. EVault sells two lines of backup appliances, including its Plug-n-Protect (PnP) and its Express Recovery Appliance (ERA). In August, the company introduced two new high-end, rack-mountable PnP devices based on Windows Server 2008 R2, and two lower-end Windows 7-based devices delivered as towers, including one PnP and one ERA appliance. The new enterprise-grade PnP3800 is EVault’s biggest appliance ever. The 3U device is equipped with 16 3-TB

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• Spinnaker Solves Payroll Issue for Big JDE World Customer

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  A large healthcare provider in the Midwest will be able to keep its payroll system running for the foreseeable future without making major changes to its JD Edwards World ERP software or its IBM i server thanks to software and services provided by Spinnaker Support, the company announced recently. The unnamed healthcare provider was in a bind. The company, which employs 3,300 across five states, needed to do something with its JD Edwards World payroll system before the end of the year. That’s when two related products–Oracle JD Edwards World A7.3 to A9.2 and the Vertex Payroll Tax

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• Interest in Simulated Role Swaps the Real Deal, Maxava Says

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  In high availability, preparation is everything. If you fail to get your systems ready for a disaster, there is little chance they’ll survive it unscathed. To that end, high availability software vendor Maxava says the simulated role swap (SRS) function in its high-end HA product, which allows customers to practice a role swap without actually triggering any downtime, is gaining popularity. The SRS functionality in Maxava Enterprise+ gives customers the capability to test applications residing on the backup system without the need to perform an actual role swap or failover. The feature works by simulating the process of turning the

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• Halcyon Goes GUI with Job Scheduler

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  To outsiders, the IBM i server is a mysterious machine with a cryptic green user interface that is best left to specialists skilled in the black arts of the proprietary machine. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and Halcyon Software is doing something about it with a new Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) in its Advanced Job Scheduler that’s designed to lower the bar of entry to working with the machine. Of course, one should still have the requisite operational skills before logging onto an IBM i job scheduler and making changes that affect production jobs running on

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• LANSA Adds Goodies to LongRange Mobile App

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a growing number of mobile application tools to choose from, which is a good thing considering the accelerating pace of smartphone adoption and increased use of tablets in the workplace. One of the more mature mobile packages available for the IBM i market can be found from LANSA in the form of LongRange, which was recently bolstered with several nifty features in LongRange RV14. LongRange is a mobile application development and runtime environment designed to give IBM i shops the capability to extend their existing RPG, DDS, and COBOL applications to mobile devices without learning HTML5,

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• IBM Patches Multiple Java Security Vulnerabilities in IBM i

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week acknowledged that it quietly patched a number of potentially critical security vulnerabilities in IBM i that could enable hackers to compromise, spoof, and gain privileged access to an affected system. The problems stem mostly from flaws in Java that Oracle disclosed in June, and which impact the Java Runtime and Java Software Development Kit (JRE/JDK) for all supported releases of the OS, from i5/OS V5R4 through IBM i 7.1. On Friday, Secunia issued an advisory that disclosed the existence of multiple security vulnerabilities in IBM i, as recorded by official CVE reference numbers. The security organization stated:

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• PSGi Offers Help for Neglected IBM i Servers

  September 17, 2013 Alex Woodie

  As the redheaded stepchild of the server world, the IBM i server is used to being unseen and unappreciated. That’s fine, because it doesn’t require a lot of babysitting (like that Windows server over there). But when the situation escalates to the level of neglect, it crosses a red line. For organizations that need a little help with IBM i, signing up for a managed service offering, such as the one that PSGi launched last month, might be a good investment. IBM i servers have a well-deserved reputation for stability and reliability. Many organizations have gone years without an abnormal

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• IBM Sells Off BPO Services Biz To Synnex For $505 Million

  September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is always rebalancing its workforce, which is a euphemism for layoffs at the company, and it is also looking to add to its portfolio of products through acquisitions or internal development as well as divesting itself of products it no longer feels are core to its business. Last week, IBM’s Global Services did a divestiture, something we don’t see very often. Specifically, IBM sold off its business process outsourcing services business to a company called Concentrix, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Synnex. According to Synnex, this business generates more than $1.2 billion providing customer

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