• ACOM Touts WebView Use at Grecian Delight

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Paper-based processes are no longer the productivity bottleneck they once were at the Chicago-based Greek food company Grecian Delight Foods. Thanks to the WebView software from ACOM Solutions, the company has transitioned from paper- and fax-based processes to electronic document distribution, which has freed more time for Grecian to concentrate on customer service. Pushing the paper was becoming a burden for the folks at Grecian Delight Foods, which ships specialty Greek and other ethnic cuisine across the country via a network of 400 distributors and 50 brokers. Jerry Czupryn, the company’s IT manager, explained the problem in a recent

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• Jasper Hunts for ‘Big Data’ Trophies with Talend’s Hooks for Hadoop

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Open source business intelligence software developer Jaspersoft has added new tools for accessing “big data” sets through Jaspersoft ETL, the extract, transform, and load (ETL) software that it OEMs from Talend. The latest release of the company’s tools includes better support for the Apache Hadoop big data framework. As one of the latest big trends in IT, big data refers to the problems organizations face as they attempt to store, manage, and process huge amounts of data. While the bottom and upper limits vary depending on the application, many midsized businesses will struggle when faced with tens or hundreds

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• Help/Systems Makes ABSTRACT Accessible Within RDP

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The ABSTRACT suite of cross-reference and documentation tools is now accessible from within the IBM i platform’s main development tool, Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP). The new feature, which was included with the ABSTRACT version 10.27 released by Help/Systems last week, will make it easier for IBM i programmers to foresee the impact their changes may have on other programs without leaving the RDP environment. ABSTRACT is a powerful utility that provides IBM i programmers with critical information about their applications. The software builds an IBM i-resident database of system objects and procedures, and through this database, the software

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• Zend Says DBi is Very Close to General Availability

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technology is about two weeks away from announcing the general availability of DBi, its drop-in replacement for the MySQL database running on the IBM i, which is important for running PHP apps on the platform. The company had expected to ship the software months ago. But an extra round of testing was done to ensure that the much-anticipated product would work as advertised. DBi is the result of a collaboration between Zend and IBM to address the problem created when Oracle dropped MySQL support for the IBM i OS in late 2010. MySQL support on the IBM i platform

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• Quadrant Launches Fax Over IP Software

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software today is expected to launch QuadraDocV, a new fax over IP (FoIP) software offering for IBM i shops. The new FoIP software runs inside a VMware virtual machine and offers the same fax capabilities that Quadrant has delivered for years with its hardware-based FastFax line of products. Customers are expected to gain by eliminating hardware from their data centers and canceling subscriptions for analog phone lines. Following the success of voice over IP (VoIP), FoIP is now gaining steam in business environments. Many organizations have already installed VoIP-enabled network switches from the major manufactures, such as Cisco or

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• Raz-Lee Claims IBM i Data-Access Breakthrough with DB-Gate

  April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security last week unveiled DB-Gate, a new database connectivity product that gives IBM i applications direct access to other databases using native IBM i SQL commands and procedures. The vendor, which is best known for its security software, claims its new patent-pending product is revolutionary because it accomplishes something that previously was difficult to do without using complicated middleware or proprietary interfaces. For all the talk of openness and adherence to standards, the IBM i platform is surprisingly shut off when it comes to enabling IBM i applications to have direct, real-time access to foreign databases. It’s not really

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• New Power Systems Redbooks, And A Call For Residency Volunteers

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are looking for the latest technical dope on the Power7-based Power Systems servers, then you will be happy to know that IBM has just updated its Redbook and Redpaper technical library to include new technologies announced last fall. Here’s a list of the latest Power Systems Redpapers, which came out on March 22: IBM Power 710 and 730 Technical Overview and Introduction PDF IBM Power 720 and 740 Technical Overview and Introduction PDF IBM Power 770 and 780 Technical Overview and Introduction PDF IBM Power 770 and 780 Technical Overview and Introduction PDF IBM Power 795 Technical Overview

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• Smart IBM i Shops Get Connected. . . Devices, That Is

  April 2, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Smart connected devices, which includes PCs, media tablets, and smartphones, are taking over the world. At least, that’s what I decided when I saw IDC reported more than 916 million units shipped and revenues surpassing $489 billion dollars in 2011 for these three classes of devices. By now, most of us get it. You can’t escape smart devices, which are no longer a personal luxury, but becoming a common tool in schools and in the workplace. But let’s put things into perspective by looking at the numbers. IDC combined the totals from its worldwide quarterly PC tracker, mobile phone tracker,

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• Cloudy SaaS Apps To Puff Up To $14.5 Billion

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there is a lot of talk about companies moving their applications to the cloud, the actual money that is being spent on clouds is more for software-as-a-service, or SaaS, applications that a company or its hosting partner runs in a cloud on behalf of customers. According to the market watchers at Gartner, companies spent $12.3 billion on SaaS software in 2011, and this slice of the software racket is expected to rise by 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion this year and continue growing at enough of a clip to reach $22.1 billion by 2015. “After more than a

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• IBM Canada Jacks Up Maintenance Prices

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Raising maintenance on older equipment is the time-tested way to help encourage customers to shell out some dough on new gear and at the same time compensate IT equipment and software makers for the increased costs of servicing hardware or applications. Last week, IBM‘s Canada unit raised maintenance on thousands of pieces of equipment. In announcement letter 312-040, IBM said that it was raising both monthly and annual maintenance fees in the Great White North on specialized banking gear, all kinds of Power-based systems (both with the i and the p labels), xSeries and System x machinery, and

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