• UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management

  June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.

  Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …

  Read more

• Here’s What’s Next for the Enterprise Software World

  May 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thirty years ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) was a hot new technology promising to help streamline business processes. While ERP continues to generate billions in revenue, it’s mostly for keeping complicated systems up and running. Now the daughter of the founder of JD Edwards is sharing a bold new vision for how her company, called Nextworld, plans to take enterprise software to the next stage.

  We first got wind of Nextworld venture about a year-and-a-half ago. We knew the Colorado company had big plans and a stream of funding from Kylee McVaney’s father, Ed McVaney. However, since Nextworld was …

  Read more

• Modernize Your Apps, Leapfrog The Competition

  April 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server has a well-deserved reputation for reliability and low cost. It also has a reputation for not being the most agile and cutting-edge platform on the market (which is also well-deserved). However, thanks to innovative modernization techniques, IBM i shops can get the benefits of innovation and perhaps leapfrog competitors who wasted resources buying middling tech along the way.

  City Furniture faced this predicament recently. The South Florida chain of furniture stores wanted to extend into the showroom the same type of experience that customers first encountered while perusing the company’s website. The company figured that putting …

  Read more

• ERP Caught Up In Cloud Updrafts

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but ERP software is headed up – into the clouds, that is. That’s according to the latest ERP survey from Panorama Consulting, which says more than four times as many users reported adopting cloud-based or SaaS ERP than deploying on-premise enterprise software.

  A quick look at Panorama Consulting‘s 2018 ERP Survey shows that cloud/software as a service (SaaS) and on-premise deployments of ERP effectively switched from 2017 to 2018. In 2017, the survey found that 67 percent of users reported deploying ERP on premise, while 33 percent reported using SaaS or cloud ERP.

  In 2018, Panorama …

  Read more

• Squeeze Your ERP A Little Harder Before Ditching It

  March 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The pressure to migrate to newer ERP systems and cloud-based applications can be heavy, particularly if you’re using perceived “legacy” platforms like the IBM i server. However, the urge to replace one technology with another should be resisted, especially if your business challenges aren’t rooted in technology.

  That’s the gist of a conversation with Eric Kimberling, the founder and managing director of Panorama Consulting Solutions, which functions as a neutral third-party adviser for customers’ ERP-related decisions. Panorama recently published a report poking holes in the widely held notion that newer ERP and cloud systems are better for business.

  “First …

  Read more

• VAI Covers All the Bases With Modernization

  December 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There are a lot of ways to “modernize” your IBM i application. You could create Web and mobile user interfaces. You could adopt free form RPG and migrate the database to modern SQL. You could host it all on the cloud. You could integrate analytic capabilities into it. Or, if you’re the IBM i ERP software vendor VAI, you could do all those things.

  VAI has, in fact, done all those things leading up to this year’s release of S2K Enterprise 6.0, and according to CEO and founder Bob Vormittag, the company is reaping big rewards as a result.

  “We’re …

  Read more

• VAI Experiments With Watson

  November 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard not to hear about Watson these days, especially since IBM changed the name of its Power Systems division to Cognitive Systems. But what can the cognitive service bring to pragmatic IBM i shops who are wary of change? The ERP software company VAI is at the forefront of experimentation.

  According to VAI CIO Kevin Beasley, VAI started working with Watson in 2016. A lot of the early work that year involved manually uploading a bunch of ERP data into Watson, mixing it with data supplied by IBM, and then seeing what Watson came up with.

  One of …

  Read more

• HVR Data Integration Has A Place For IBM i

  November 8, 2017 Dan Burger

  Data integration is powering changes in enterprise computing. And although it doesn’t get talked about a lot, relational databases are major factors in the enterprise business analytics. Transactional processing systems that are the workhorses of enterprise applications such as ERP are rock solid and critical to data analytics regardless of the hoopla and hyperbole that “modern” databases create.

  Fitting a relational database into a heterogeneous environment that is pumped full of continuous data integration from a variety of sources can be a problem, but lessons are being learned as data integration becomes more platform inclusive at more companies.

  HVR Software …

  Read more

• Functionality Trumps Glitz in ERP Decision

  November 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  What do you look for in a new ERP system? For the folks at Veterinary Purchasing Company, which is transitioning away from its homegrown S/36-era ERP system, the decision came down to a preference for proven substance over hollow glamor.

  Veterinary Purchasing Company is a member-owned company that was founded in 1972 by a group of veterinarians who wanted to increase their purchasing power by buying in bulk on the wholesale market. The company, which employs about 210 people at its headquarters in St Mary, Ontario, also sells to non-shareholder vets and animal hospitals across Canada.

  In the mid-1970s, VP …

  Read more

• IT Horror Stories

  October 30, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Let’s face it: IT can be downright scary. From unpatched servers and failed ERP implementations to clueless CIOs and that clown in the server room, information technology is a business fraught with danger. Here are a few IT tales that could keep you up at night.

  Are hackers lurking in your system? It’s more likely if you haven’t kept up on your patches. That’s the horrific lesson learned by Equifax, which recently disclosed that it lost sensitive data for 143 million consumers after bad guys worked their way into the system through a vulnerability in some open source middleware that …

  Read more

Previous Articles