Vision Solutions yesterday announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Double-Take Software, a developer of high availability software for Windows and Linux, for $10.55 per share, or $242 million. By acquiring its partner, Vision would gain a strong foothold in the Windows and Linux HA market, to complement its strong portfolio of HA products in the IBM i/OS space.

Double-Take Software is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ ticker symbol: DBTK) that has struggled to regain its footing after the global economic crises erupted soon after its IPO in late 2006.

The company, which is based

Trader’s, the French developers of the Quick-EDD/HA high availability software for i/OS servers, has signed iSam Blue of Utah as a master distributor for the North American market, the two companies announced at the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida. The partners also unveiled version 10 of the Quick-EDD/HA software, which introduces a new GUI, among other enhancements.

Trader’s has been trying to break into the North American market for i/OS high availability market for several years, with limited success. While the vendor says 150 of its total installed base of 1,000 customers are based in North America (the

Among the various ways of creating modern applications that support the IBM i operating system, the methodology employed by BCD has been a good match for many midrange shops. BCD’s RPG CGI- and PHP-based development options have a 10-year history of continual upgrades that parallel the company’s long-term investments in query and report software, document distribution software, and more recently in multi-platform portal and 5250 Web enablement software. Timing for its most recent batch of software upgrades coincided with the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition.

BCD has produced software for IBM’s midrange computers–including the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now

Seagull Software is developing I/O handlers for RPG Open Access that will make it easier for System i shops to integrate their i/OS applications using service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, the software vendor says. The company, whose GUI development tools are used by some of the biggest i/OS ISVs, is taking a wait-and-see approach to using RPG OA to develop GUIs.

RPG Open Access is a new feature that IBM added with i/OS 7.1. The technology enables developers to, for the first time, entirely bypass the 5250 data stream, which has been used to generate green-screen interfaces for i/OS applications.

Pivot tables, a popular way to quickly sort specific rows and columns in a spreadsheet, are now available in applications built using mrc‘s m-Power Web application development tool, the vendor announced at the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida. The new pivot report template is expected to give m-Power users a powerful new way to work with and visualize DB2/400 data from the comfort of a Web browser.

Lotus developer Pito Salas is credited with coming up with the concept of the pivot table while working on a new Lotus product in 1991. Salas reportedly realized that a tool

When 10ZiG obtained the rights to BOSaNOVA Secure and three other products sold under the BOSaNOVA name, it had an obligation to service existing customers, keep investing in the products, and stay current with the latest versions of the IBM i operating system. BOSaNOVA Secure version 8 is the follow through of that promise.

BOSaNOVA, and its worldwide customer base that relies on its iSeries connectivity products, thin clients and network appliances, was acquired by 10ZiG in late 2009. Since then, BOSaNOVA customers have relied on 10ZiG for product distribution and support as well as research and development of future

Halcyon Software used the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, as the setting for the launch of Operations Center version 3, a new release of its most feature-rich suite of i/OS systems management tools. Version 3 introduces new features in the areas of LPAR monitoring, system performance, and spool file management. Meanwhile, a new release of Halcyon’s management software for Unix, Linux, and Windows servers brings more Linux management capabilities.

Halcyon sells two main product lines: one for “open systems” platforms like Windows, Unix, and Linux called Network Server Suite, and one for the i/OS server.

Its i/OS product line

One of the companies hawking new wares at the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, was Krengel Technology, the Minnesota provider of integration tools for i/OS applications. At the show, Krengel was touting a new product called KRENGELSHIP that provides RPG connectivity to the computer systems and Web services interfaces offered by shipping giant UPS to expedite package registration, pickup, and delivery.

KRENGELSHIP (which the company always spells with capital letters) provides four basic functions for i/OS shops that need to ship packages via UPS. These include address verification, time in transit delivery estimates, rate request, and package tracking.

We’ve all known that the System i server is the ideal platform for running software as a service (SaaS) applications. What is heartening is that IBM is now touting this very idea to the broader IT world through a new 21-page white paper, called “IBM i and SaaS: Positioning IBM i as a software as a service platform.”

Written by Jon Rush, who works in IBM Systems and Technology Group’s Lab Services, the new white paper makes a good case for the i/OS server providing a solid platform for running SaaS workloads.

Several i operating system elements make it an

ERP software developer International Business Systems, which is battling the perception that it develops software that only runs on the IBM “iSeries” server, announced recently that it has been awarded a gold certified partnership by Microsoft.

For the last two years, IBS has been working to transition its development organization from targeting the i/OS-RPG-DB2 stack that runs on IBM’s Power Systems hardware to targeting the Windows-Java-SQL Server stack that runs on cheap and powerful X64 hardware from any number of vendors.

While the Swedish company is not abandoning its vast installed base of ERP applications across thousands of