• Liaison Connects to Clouds with Updated EAI Offering

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Liaison Technologies is close to shipping new versions of Electronic Commerce Server (ECS) and Delta, two components of its enterprise application integration (EAI) offering. The big feature here is a new cloud connector in ECS 7.0 that will simplify the process of integrating cloud-based applications and data with on-premise resources. ECS and Delta offer complementary capabilities in the area of application integration, and together make up a complete EAI solution. ECS is the engine that moves data across platforms and protocols; it also includes managed file transfer (MFT) functionality. Delta, meanwhile, is a universal data mapping and translation solution that

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• Staples Finds Its Own Easy Button with Help/Systems

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Staples, the $25 billion office supply retailer, has simplified the jobs of its IT help desk staff by using IBM i automation software from Help/Systems, the software vendor announced last week. Before implementing Help/Systems products, Staples’ IT staff struggled to do anything beyond day-to-day maintenance tasks. The company relied on an operations run book to guide Staples’ IT staff through the manual steps required to maintain 34 IBM i LPARs, which house critical applications, including point of sale, credit card authorization, inventory, and warehouse management. Using a run book wasn’t a particularly efficient form of management, especially considering the

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• Vision Preps New Release of iTera Availability

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions is gearing up to deliver a new release of its iTera Availability high availability software in early 2013. iTera Availability 6.1 is already in limited release, and when it becomes generally available next quarter, it will bring enhancements in several areas, including faster replication through expanded use of remote journaling, new auditing and reporting features, and improved installation and configuration processes, Vision representatives say. iTera Availability is one of three high availability products for IBM i servers offered by Vision Solutions. The remote journaling-based product is geared toward the small and midsize business (SMB) end of the market,

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• VAI Promises New User Experience with S2K 5.4

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  VAI is nearing completion of S2K Enterprise 5.4, its IBM i-based ERP offering for small and midsize companies in the manufacturing, distribution, and retail industries. With version 5.4, VAI will be delivering a new Web client that, for the first time, will offer function parity with VAI’s Windows client, and look and feel exactly like other VAI products. Integration with IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business is another feature in this release. For many years, VAI has offered a Web client for its S2K software to go along with Windows and 5250 interfaces. However, the old HTML interface didn’t offer

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• CNX Ships IBM i Administrator App for Smart Phones

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  CNX this week introduced a new mobile application called Nitro iAdmin that lets administrators monitor and manage their IBM i servers from the comfort of their iOS, Android OS, and Blackberry smartphones. The modern looking Web app lets administrators deal with common IBM i tasks, such as responding to jobs in MSGW status, re-enabling user profiles, and moving spool files to different printer queues. There’s even a red button that will IPL the server. Ever since pagers started to become popular in the 1970s, system administrators have looked for ways to stay hooked into their servers while outside of the

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• BVS Unveils Jabber-Based Messaging Tool for IBM i

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  BVS Tools is rolling out GreenJab, a new utility that enables two-way communication between the IBM i server and any client device that supports the Jabber (XMPP) instant messaging (IM) protocol. The product, which is entering beta, will give administrators another way to get critical alerts from the IBM i server, and even to submit commands or execute other tasks on the IBM i server. Jabber, officially known as Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), is an open source, XML-based IM protocol that’s also an official IETF Internet standard. There are more than 100 XMPP/Jabber clients available on the market,

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• The Daily Grind Of Social Business

  November 26, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  In our private lives, social media is unavoidable. Even if you don’t have the uncontrollable urge to post every time you visit a Starbucks, at this point, the vast majority of us have succumbed to peer pressure and joined at least one social network where we can go to see pictures of our friends and find out what they ate for lunch. In our work lives, personal social media usage is largely frowned upon, but using social technology as a business tool is unavoidable and, for many, a critical component for success. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity

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• LANSA Takes Your Company’s iPulse

  November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The U.S. presidential election might be over, but the polling is not. Application modernization tool maker LANSA doesn’t care a bit about your politics, but it does care very much about the political environment in which the IBM i platform lives inside your company. To that end, LANSA has opened up its third annual iPulse Survey, which aims to assess the threat level to the IBM i platform in your organization, your future plans for IBM i applications, and what your budget for software development is for the coming 2013 year. In addition, LANSA is polling customers to figure out

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• Flex System Gets New Control Freak, Switches, And Inside V7000 Array

  November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The November 13 Flex System mini-announcement didn’t just feature some new Power7+ p260 server nodes and configurations of the PureFlex infrastructure stacks sporting all of the various server nodes instead of the x240 Xeon E5 node. IBM made a few other announcements in systems management, switching, and storage related to the platform. In announcement letter 212-475, you will see that the Flex System Manager, the control freak for the entire server-storage-network mashup that is PureSystems, has been upgraded to V1.2. And in that update, the software not only speaks to the new Power7+ nodes reported on elsewhere in this

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• PureSystems Sales Break Through The 1,000 Customer Barrier

  November 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every market has its own psychological barrier, and for IBM systems, the magic number seems to be 1,000. As part of the tweaks to the PureSystems upgrade on November 13, Big Blue was bragging that it now has more than 1,000 unique customers worldwide using the new boxes. IBM did not supply any numbers regarding the volume of server nodes or racks these first kilo-customers that it found for the modular systems, which consist of its Flex System chassis and Flex Power and x86 server nodes. These are stacked up in racks with switches and integrated storage to make the

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