• Thoma Bravo Sells Flexera to Canadian Teachers

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has acquired control of Flexera Software, developers of the InstallAnywhere installation utility that’s used by IBM i ISVs, from its private equity owners, Thoma Bravo. More than 70,000 ISVs use Flexera’s installation tools, including the multi-platform InstallAnywhere and InstallShield, which supports Windows. InstallShield is the more recognized asset, as millions of people around the world use it everyday to install and uninstall software from their Windows PCs. But the installation protection that InstallAnywhere provides on IBM i, z/OS, and Unix servers gives Flexera clout in the enterprise. Last week, Thoma Bravo announced that

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• RJS to Provide Single Sign-On

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  RJS Software Systems plans to debut single sign-on (SSO) across its range of document management and information capture products, the company recently revealed. It also issued updates to its Web-based document management and its electronic form and report generator. A June posting to the company’s blog, RJS Informer, indicates the company is working on adding SSO to its range of solutions. The Burnsville, Minnesota, company has 34 products in its catalog, but focuses primarily on its newer document management offerings, such as WebDocs, iForms, WebForms, DeliverNow, iPrint, SignHere, inContact, DocumentAssembly, and Enterprise Workflow. “RJS will soon add single sign-on

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• HiT Ships Updated DB2/400 for .NET Data Provider

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  HiT Software this month unveiled a new release of Ritmo, a .NET data provider used to hook DB2/400 and other DB2 databases into the latest Windows applications. With version 5, the software vendor now enables developers to work with Ritmo from within Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, among several other new capabilities. Ritmo is a Windows-based product that helps Windows developers build high-speed, native data connections between their .NET applications and their data residing in the three DB2 database versions, including DB2/400, DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows, and DB2 for the mainframe. The software does this by reading SQL statements

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• inFORM Decisions Adds Conditioning to Data Mapping Tool

  July 26, 2011 Dan Burger

  Big things come in small packages. For instance, version 3 of the iMap electronic forms utility just released by inFORM Decisions. It is the mapping component for iForms, the company’s suite of products for converting spool files into laser printer output or electronic documents, which run natively on the IBM i platform. With version 3, it should be easier for non-technical people to customize how iMap distributes documents. iForms was designed to allow companies to create their own business forms and reports rather than purchasing those documents from printing vendors and incurring those costs. And for companies that are

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• Linoma Breaks Crypto Tool into Two

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Customers can now separately purchase the database and backup encryption capabilities of Linoma Software‘s IBM i encryption tool, called Crypto Complete. With last week’s release of version 3, customers that only need the tool to protect their backups and IFS files can save up to 50 percent in license fees. Version 3 also sports performance enhancements in the encryption and tokenization processes. Linoma launched Crypto Complete in September 2007 in response to customer demand for database encryption tools. The vendor had already been providing i5/OS encryption in its managed file transfer (MFT) tool, Transfer Anywhere (now called GoAnywhere), but

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• PowerTech Blocks IBM i Commands with New Tool

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM i administrators can prevent users from executing certain commands with the new Command Security tool unveiled by PowerTech this month. Command Security features a rule-based control mechanism that can block commands for certain users and circumstances, or even modify the command before execution. It also features an audit trail that ensures attempts to use specific commands won’t go unnoticed. While the text-based command line is viewed by Windows and Web aficionados as a vestigial backwater overlooked by computer evolution, devotees of the IBM i server understand how powerful and useful the command line can be. Instead of fooling around

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• Oracle’s Environmental Accounting App Finds Gold in Going Green

  July 26, 2011 Alex Woodie

  What’s the return on investment (ROI) for going green? For individual consumers, it may be that warm, fuzzy feeling you get from driving a Toyota Prius. But in the corporate world, warm and fuzzy doesn’t cut it. Now, new software from Oracle gives managers the hard numbers on their companies’ environmental footprints, as well as how they stack up against the latest environmental regulations. Best of all it does this from within companies’ existing JD Edwards and Oracle ERP systems. Business people are becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental impact that their companies–as well as the companies they do business

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• Big Blue Doesn’t Compete Against i Cloud Backup Vendors

  July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange is a mouthy bunch, and we spend a lot of time telling IBM what it should do and what it should not do. Just for a change of pace, I want to point out something that Big Blue has not done and show you why this is a good thing. Last week, in announcement letter 611-007, the company talked about its plan to offer the SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery on its SmartCloud compute and storage clouds. As the name suggests, this is a full managed service that allows companies to fail-over their workloads running on Windows or

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• Database Revenues on the Rise, So Sayeth the Tracker

  July 25, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  The database market is expected to perform well in 2011, according to a new report from IDC. Current IDC projections for relational database management systems, or RDBMSes in the proper lingo for databases, added to data integration and access software that works in conjunction with databases, show that these combined categories will show 6.5 percent growth this year, hitting $33.9 billion. This follows a solid performance in the second half of 2010, when the market achieved year-over-year growth of 6.7 percent on revenues of $15.9 billion. If you do the math on the data released by IDC, then the

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• IBM Has A Fire Sale on BNT Rack Switches

  July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I guess that IBM has a bunch of Gigabit Ethernet switches sitting in the barn and it wants to get rid of them real bad before the end of the year without having to make any sales calls to get the job done. Last week, in announcement letter 311-101, Big Blue, which is now a network equipment maker thanks to last year’s acquisition of Blade Network Technologies for an estimated $400 million, slashed the price on one of its top-of-rack switches. Specifically, IBM chopped the price on the RackSwitch G8052, a 1U rack-based switch with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports

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