• SEA Now Selling Centerity Systems Management Tool

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Software Engineering of America was one of 75 vendors demonstrating their wares at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. And while SEA is a regular at COMMON, this was the first time the company was talking about Centerity, a new systems management tool that it’s selling into its IBM i and mainframe customer bases. Centerity is a monitoring and management solution designed to provide IT departments with a real-time view into the health and availability of their applications and business services. SEA says the product offers comparable functionality to established enterprise management tools, but with less cost and complexity. The

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• Vision Shares Some 2012 Product Plans

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions is a much different company than it was five years ago. Aside from running three major IBM i high availability software lines, Vision is also doing a brisk business with HA and DR software for Windows, Linux, and Unix servers thanks to its DoubleTake acquisition. Vision executives plotted out the rest of the year’s roadmap during the recent COMMON conference in Southern California. Vision has already made one major HA announcement this year. In March it launched MIMIX Availability for IBM i version 7.1, which brought a boost to replication performance, especially for more complex environments. At the

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• Surround Tech Adds Goodies to .NET Development Tool for IBM i

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Over the last few years, Surround Technologies has been building out its collection of Microsoft .NET-based user interface controls for applications that run on the IBM i server. At the recent COMMON conference held at Disneyland, Surround Tech displayed the latest new UI goodies that developers can play with. Surround Tech’s flagship product, Accelerator for .NET, allows developers to create modern Windows, Web, and mobile interfaces for existing IBM i applications. The software, which functions as a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio, features a collection of pre-assembled components and wizard-driven code generators based on the latest user interface technologies, including

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• SkyView Launches Security Compliance Reporting Service

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are struggling to find the resources to meet their security and compliance reporting requirements may be interested in a new managed services offering unveiled yesterday by SkyView Partners. As part of the Managed Services for Compliance Reporting (MSCR) solution, SkyView will do much of the hard work associated with maintaining security policies, addressing exceptions, and managing compliance for IBM i and AIX servers on an on-going basis. When a company faces a new regulation such as PCI or the Hi Tech Act for the first time, there’s usually a big push on the part of the IT

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• NGS Unveils BI Development Kit for Under $500

  May 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  Business intelligence on IBM i goes beyond DB2 Web Query or Cognos and it goes well beyond the most commonly used reporting tool, the old Query/400. If that’s all you know about BI on i, then you need to know about New Generation Software (NGS), which used the recent COMMON conference as a springboard to announce a new BI software development tool that costs less than $500. NGS has marketed its products as the more affordable option to IBM software and is eager to demonstrate a better return on investment, which the company suspects will jump start business intelligence deployments.

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• EMC Unveils New VMAX, IBM i Support for FAST Technology

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  EMC yesterday announced that it now supports IBM i with its FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) technology, which enables data inside EMC arrays to be automatically moved between traditional disk and solid state disk (SSD) for the best bang for the storage buck. Among the many other announcements made at the annual EMC World extravaganza was the Symmetrix VMAX 40k, a hulking beast of a SAN that immediately becomes the largest and fastest disk array in the world. As data ages, it typically becomes less valuable to an organization. Because of this, organizations have historically moved

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• mPainter Gets HTML5 Support

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  mPainter, the GUI customization tool that’s part of mrc‘s mPower suite, has been overhauled to support the Web’s latest HTML5 standard. Along with HTML5 support, mPainter gains a host of other new features designed to make it easier to spruce up the look of the automatically generated, Java-based mPower programs. mPainter plays an important role in the mPower suite. The Web-based product is used to tweak and alter the Java servlet-based GUIs that are automatically generated by mPower, such as by adding graphics, company logos, maps, drop-down boxes, popups, hover boxes, lists, or other visual elements that the customer

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• Double-Digit Growth For Supply Chain Management Software Sellers

  May 21, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Despite uncertain economic times in most industries, IT related or not, there’s at least one group that’s got a reason to smile. According to a recent report from the analysts at Gartner, the worldwide supply chain management software market grew 12.3 percent in 2011, totaling out at a whopping $7.7 billion. Just two years ago, IT Jungle reported on slumping sales in SCM software revenue, which hit a mere $6.2 billion in 2009. The jump in 2011 is actually the second year of double-digit growth for the SCM software market. There wasn’t any shuffling for position amongst the top

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• IBM To Start Charging For Power Systems Shipping And Handling

  May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have been shopping for stuff online in the past several years, you know that the cost of shipping things has gone through the roof. And IBM is well aware of this too, and is not about to absorb the shipping costs on Power Systems gear when its peers in the server racket charge for shipping and handling. To that end, in announcement letter 112-066 and in a further clarification in announcement letter 212-239, IBM explained that staring on July 10, it will be adding shipping and handling features to selected Power Systems equipment. The shipping and handling

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• COMMON Adds Youthfulness To Board Of Directors

  May 21, 2012 Dan Burger

  Like the flocking of birds and the schooling of fish, the COMMON user group continues to illustrate the rule of thumb that there is safety in numbers. Being part of a community, whether it revolves around IBM i or Power Systems or beer drinking and the telling of preposterous tales is social education, entertainment, and an important link to others who belong to your same tribe. Most people enjoy being with like-thinkers, even though there are often times when it seems we are less alike than previously thought. Over the years, COMMON has been the community center where group activities,

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