Complexity can be a killer in the IT business. Layer too many moving parts into a given business process, and you can be sure that somebody will find a way to break it. One IT vendor that’s been helping small and mid-sized businesses root out complexity from their backup and recovery processes is Unitrends, which has quietly amassed a substantial customer base with its all-in-one line of disk-to-disk (D2D) and D2D2D backup appliances.

Mark Campbell, the CTO and COO of Unitrends, knows a thing or two about the lasting power of simple yet elegant designs. Campbell was running NCR’s

If you’ve ever been turned down for a room in a major Las Vegas casino when the hotel was obviously not full, it probably made you mad. And it probably doesn’t help knowing that the software that told the front desk to reject you was written by the Rainmaker Group. But when you realize that Rainmaker’s revenue optimization software has made casinos hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, you can begin to understand why it’s in such widespread use.

Rainmaker started out in 1998 writing schedule optimization software for a completely different business: the airline industry. But

Patrick Townsend Security Solutions last week introduced Alliance All-Ways Secure version 5.0, a new release of its managed file transfer (MFT) solution for System i customers. The product brings support for 128-bit SSH encryption over FTP (sFTP), which will allow customers to share files with banks that have standardized on sFTP. Version 5.0 also brings enhancements in the area of configuration and logging, and makes it easier for IBM i users to comply with data privacy laws, PTSS says.

Pat Townsend (the man and the company) is a recognized expert in encryption on the i/OS platform, and has been selling

Linoma Software last week announced a new version of GoAnywhere Director, its enterprise-strength managed file transfer (MFT) solution that runs on i/OS and other major operating systems. With version 3.0, the vendor has expanded its support for secure transfer protocols and digital signatures, and delivered new ways that customers can use the tool to automate recurring business processes that involve secure file transfer.

GoAnywhere Director debuted nearly two years ago as the platform-independent, browser-based replacement for Transfer Anywhere, which Linoma debuted in 2002, and which ran only on OS/400 and Windows. About four months ago Linoma split the GoAnywhere product

Jack Henry & Associates and Fiserv may dominate discussions of so-called “core” account processing platforms that run on the IBM i/OS platform. But with more than a dozen new multi-year licenses for its HORIZON core banking system in 2009, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) is making a strong case for its i/OS-based software.

FIS was created in November 2006 when Fidelity National Financial spun off its information services division into a separate entity, and combined it with card issuer Certegy. Several years and several acquisitions later, FIS chairman William P. Foley, II led the company’s biggest acquisition yet: the $2.94

Capitalware last month debuted two new tools that allow users to browse and edit the contents of their MQSeries (WebSphere MQ) messages. MQ Visual Edit version 1.5.1, which supports full editing capabilities, and MQ Visual Browse version 1.5.1, which restrict users to viewing messages, will be welcomed by programmers and testers who need to work with MQ messages, the company says.

MQ Visual Edit provides a full range of capabilities for developers and support professionals working with MQ messages. The Java-based software provides a graphical environment that allows users to open and work with the contents of MQ messages from

ProData Computer Services last week unveiled the first new version of its Reactivate Deleted Records (RDR) software in nearly a decade. The software, which recovers files that have been accidentally deleted on the System i server, needed to be updated to work with the latest release of IBM i/OS, version 6.1.

RDR helps to automate the process of recovering records that have been accidentally deleted, which occurs surprisingly often on this platform. The product provides access to the RDR command, which allows users to recover all the records from any member of a physical file that has been deleted, or

Time was, the only “business intelligence” your company required could be gleaned from a 12-inch stack of green-bar reports and a pot of strong coffee. But times have changed, and keeping up with the Joneses today requires slightly more sophisticated forms of data analyses. One developer of modern BI technology, Information Builders, recently shared some customer success stories that showcase unusual uses of its WebFOCUS suite.

Information Builders is encouraging its customers to think outside the box when it comes to building and deploying BI software. While most organizations that have adopted BI currently use it for back-office reporting,

Lotusphere is being held down in Florida this week, so that means a revival of the annual e-mail and collaboration wars between IBM and Microsoft. It also means vendors will start ramping up new releases of tools for migrating between the two major e-mail systems. The new migration software from Transend is a good example.

Transend is no newbie to the e-mail migration gig, or general e-mail product development, for that matter. In fact, the Silicon Valley firm has been developing e-mail clients and utilities since it was founded in 1983, and claims to have successfully migrated more than

Cloud computing and hybrid cloud computing are not just the latest high-tech terms to be flaunted by hype-hungry marketers. Instead, the terms refer to a real phenomenon that’s set to have a big impact on how organizations consume IT in 2010, according to a report issued last week by Evans Data Corp.

According to EDC’s latest “Cloud Development Survey,” which involved a survey of more than 400 developers during November and December of last year, more than 61 percent of developers say that at least some of their IT resources will move into a public cloud during 2010.

“The hybrid