• IntelliChief to Provide Document Automation for B&L

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IntelliChief to Provide Document Automation for B&L IntelliChief and B&L Information Systems have partnered to enable IntelliChief’s document management software to work with Odyssey, B&L’s ERP system for companies in the foundry and die-casting business. The integration between IntelliChief’s document management software and Odyssey is based on the integration the two companies developed for BLIS-400, which is B&L’s IBM i-based ERP system, about three years ago, when IntelliChief was still part of Quadrant Software. Odyssey runs on the Windows OS, and is the company’s flagship product today. In fact, BLIS-400 isn’t even listed on the company’s website under

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• ManageEngine Bolsters Performance Management Tools

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Keeping applications running well can be a challenge in today’s complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Users don’t care whether their apps are running in “the cloud,” on a giant mainframe, or a cluster of PC servers. All they care about is whether the apps work and how quickly they respond. IT tool maker ManageEngine was at VMworld last week to announce several product updates that aim to simplify performance management in virtualized environments. Frustrated by slow applications, organizations around the world are turning to application performance management (APM) tools to help them get a handle on performance problems. According to a

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• Equity Firm Merges Quadrant and Softbase, Eyes Further IBM i Acquisitions

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Candescent Partners last month announced that it has merged two of its holdings, Quadrant Software and Softbase, into a single entity. The move will pave the way for Quadrant, the parent company, to make further acquisitions in the IBM i and z/OS software market. Candescent acquired IBM i document automation software vendor Quadrant Software nearly two years ago in a deal that also saw the spin-off of Quadrant’s content management and workflow product line, called IntelliChief, into its own company, leaving Quadrant with the FastFax and Formtastic products. Candescent then acquired Softbase, a provider of z/OS coding, testing,

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• Liaison Grows Its Cloud with Acquisition of HubSpan

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Liaison Technologies, a developer of security and data integration software that runs on IBM i and other platforms, has acquired Hubspan, a provider of a cloud-based business process management (BPM) integration platform. You can think of HubSpan’s cloud, called the WebSpan SaaS Integration Platform, as an EDI translator on steroids. The hosted application does the grunt work of executing, choreographing, validating, and monitoring the flow of data and business documents among multiple parties. But WebSpan goes beyond traditional EDI translation or even newer FTP-based AS2 messaging to support the vast array of technologies and techniques used to integrate

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• Indigo Chooses CNX’s Valence to Modernize RPG App

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Indigo Software, a British provider of software and services to the System21 ecosystem, has selected the Valence toolset from CNX to modernize its RPG application. Since 1988, Indigo has served the community of System21 users throughout Europe and beyond. The company, which was formerly called JBA North East, is an Infor reseller for the System21 product, which has its heritage in the U.K. In addition to selling, installing, and supporting System21 environments, Indigo also develops several packaged add-on products aimed at enhancing the venerable ERP system. These include barcoding and RFID automation solutions and an IBM i-based warehouse management

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• Trimble to Buy Trucking Software Firm TMW Systems for $335M

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Trimble Navigation Limited, a publicly traded provider of positioning solutions used by government and industry, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire trucking software developer TMW Systems for $335 million. The deal will net Trimble several IBM i-based enterprise trucking software systems, and hundreds of IBM i customers. TMW had consolidated much of the market for dispatching and fleet management solutions since being acquired by two private equity firms, Wachovia Capital Partners and Peppertree Capital Management, back in September 2005. At that time, TMW was just one of the players in the trucking ERP business, and peddled two core

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• Maxava Taps Baseline to Resell HA in the Cloud

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Baseline Data Services, an Indiana IT services firm that specializes in disaster recovery and data storage, has partnered with IBM i high availability software developer Maxava. Baseline will use Maxava HA to replicate customer data to the IBM i backup servers it runs in its data center. The cloud land grab is in full swing in the IT world. While non IBM i customers appear more willing to run production apps in a cloud provider’s data center, few IBM i customers appear willing to make that jump. There is one area, however, where the cloud has generated a

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• IBM i Excel Spreadsheet Generator Now Unicode Compliant

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  iDATA Development recently delivered a new release of iEXL, its Excel spreadsheet generation software that runs on IBM i. With V3R2, the software is now Unicode compliant, which will enable Asian IBM i shops to take advantage of iEXL. iEXL is an IBM i program that generates Excel spreadsheets directly from DB2/400 files. The software is used by employees and managers who prefer to see and work with company data within the comfort of Microsoft Excel, as opposed to any of the other myriad ways of getting at the data, such as canned reporting tools, ad hoc query tools, or

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• Security Bundle Blocks Unwanted Web Traffic from Reaching IBM i

  September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IT professionals who are concerned about hackers pinging their exposed IBM i Web or FTP servers for security holes and configuration problems may be interested in a new security solution from KDP Software. The English firm is in the process of rolling out Perimeter Security for IBM i, a bundle of security tools that almost immediately blocks unwanted traffic at the network firewall, helping to shield not only the IBM i server but any other server sitting behind the firewall. Perimeter Security for IBM i, which is still in beta, is composed of several pieces. At the center of

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• The Ethernet Switch Market Is Booming

  August 27, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market has stalled a little bit as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Oracle, and Fujitsu are in various stages of processor transitions. But the Ethernet switch market is going gangbusters as companies begin the transition to from Gigabit to 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching in the data center. According to the box counters at IDC, the worldwide market for Layer 2 and 3 switching gear that adheres to the Ethernet protocol accounted for $5.52 billion in revenues, an increase of 8.5 percent year-over-year across all Ethernet port speeds. At Layers 3 through 7 in

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