• Quadrant Widens Its Document-Input Reach with New SAP Connector

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software last week unveiled a new connector that facilities bidirectional fax communication between SAP ERP systems and QuadraDocV, the new fax-over-IP (FoIP) document distribution solution it launched earlier this year. The company also announced its second release of QuadraDocV, which has become its flagship product and is clearly not just for FoIP anymore. The launch of QuadraDocV this April was a milestone for Quadrant Software, a company that has become synonymous in the IBM i world with production fax solutions. While the company’s FastFax offering had been integrated into ERP systems and used successfully by thousands of IBM i

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• Shield Boosts Performance, Flexibility with HA4i 7.1

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is rolling out a new release of its high availability software for IBM i, HA4i 7.1. The new version sports a brand spanking new journal apply process that Shield says gives its customers more flexibility in how they configure their high availability environments when compared to the traditional IBM apply process. The extensive testing phase of HA4i 7.1 also revealed a performance boost in some situations, the company says. HA4i is a logical replication high availability solution that’s based on IBM’s remote journaling technology. When it started out in 2007 under the name Receiver Apply Program (RAP),

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• All Eyes on User Security as Cyber Criminals Up Their Game

  October 9, 2012 Alex Woodie

  In the cat and mouse game between security experts and cyber criminals, there is rarely a spare moment to catch one’s breath. Just as the good guys think they have all their bases covered, the hoodlums find another way to slither past defenses and into corporate networks. Keeping a watchful eye on end-user devices is especially critical today, in light of new forms of malware, like the RAT (remote access Trojans) and polymorphic viruses. The FBI recently warned about an increase in blended attacks against banks in the United States. Perhaps you have received one of the phishing emails that

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• The Mobile Enterprise Management Software Market Is Born

  October 8, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  We’ve been warning you for years that mobile devices are poised to take over the world, and the rampant proliferation of smartphones and tablets has caused the analysts over at IDC to create a new market category for our little portable addictions. The name of this new market isn’t exactly catchy or all that clear. “Mobile enterprise management software” sounds like a catch-all for any software that might fall into the mobile category. But then again, it kind of is. IDC explains that back in the old days (which in this case may have been last week), the mobile market

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• ERP Gets Wrapped Up In New Technologies

  October 8, 2012 Dan Burger

  In the small to midsize business (SMB) arena, the IBM midrange shops have traditionally done well because of the excellent ERP applications available for a wide variety of vertical industries and the scalability that the system provides as businesses grow. However, markets change. Sometimes technologies follow and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes technologies change and cause markets to follow. A recent report from the ERP observers at AberdeenGroup, based on a survey of 300 SMB companies (with no indication if any are running ERP on IBM i), put new technologies in the spotlight. In the process of sorting out

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• The Search For IBM i Intelligent Life

  October 8, 2012 Dan Burger

  The pipeline of students graduating from college ready, willing, and able to step into an IT position at an IBM midrange shop isn’t what it once was, and those who claim the young talent pool has dried up like a west Texas watering hole aren’t far from the truth. But for companies with current and future jobs for recent grads who have IBM i experience, there’s good news. Worldwide there are 96 schools with classes that include IBM i subject matter, and 44 of those are in the United States. Finding those schools, as companies previously searching for talent found

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• Take The Top Concerns Survey, Ask Others To Do The Same

  October 8, 2012 Dan Burger

  You work in the IBM i community. That gives you a perspective that is worth talking about. Some of that perspective is shared by others who work on the IBM midrange platform and the overall IT professional community. Some of your perspectives are unique to your own career, the company that employs you, and your geographic location. You’re integrated, but you are also a silo of proprietary information. This is about sharing your information. It’s about becoming more integrated with the IBM i community and with IBM. I’m talking about feedback. I’m talking about your view of the IBM i

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• IBM Preps Big Data, Cloud “Project Sparta” Announcements For October 9

  October 8, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  April was a busy month for IBM with a slew of Power Systems and IBM i announcements, and October is shaping up to be a busy time, too. IBM has sent out the invitations to an online event that it is hosting on October 9 at 2 p.m. Eastern that will talk about “the new PureSystems Family Member,” to quote Big Blue, that will “accelerate big data and cloud with Expert Integrated Systems.” A story last week in the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things D column said that IBM was fixing to launch some new iron that was developed

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• IBM Throttles Storage I/O With New SAN And LTO6 Tape Drive

  October 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week unveiled a new Power7-based disk array called the System Storage DS8870 that delivers up to three times the I/O as its previous flagship storage area network (SAN) array. Big Blue’s big fall product launch also brought a new LTO6 tape drive that promises a significant upgrade in backup throughput compared to older LTO5 drives. A new release of the Storwize V7000 midrange SAN management software and a new SmartCloud storage offering round out the storage announcements. The new DS8870 replaces the DS8800 at the top of IBM’s SAN heap, and while the two arrays look very similar

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Thinking About Thinkstuff

  October 8, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  If you are like most business computer users, it’s been a long time since your go-to gadget was a ThinkPad. But outside the declining post-industrial economics, Lenovo‘s client computers are market leaders. This year, with Hewlett-Packard and Dell slipping, Lenovo’s third world first strategy could bring it to first place on a global basis. The company’s next conquests might be in the server business. You don’t think so? Well, EMC does. Soon, your servers might say Lenovo instead of IBM, if not on their outside name tags, very possibly on the inside ones that count. Unusually, the people

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