Help/Systems yesterday unveiled a new version of its popular backup and recovery tool for IBM i. Robot/SAVE 12 introduces more granular backups of the IFS that the company says will save customers time and resources. The new release also brings new restore and reporting features for IFS content.

Robot/SAVE is arguably the most popular third-party backup and recovery and media management utility in the IBM i marketplace. For organizations that seek more capabilities than can be provided by IBM‘s backup utility, BRMS, Robot/SAVE is often at the top of their list.

The capability to perform granular saves of IFS

VAI last week unveiled a new release of S2K Analytics, a business intelligence solution that’s pre-integrated with its IBM i-based ERP suite. The new version of S2K Analytics is based on IBM‘s Cognos product family, giving customers access to capabilities that weren’t available with the previous release of the product, which was based on QlikTech‘s software, VAI officials say.

VAI launched S2K Analytics over a year ago to satisfy its customers’ demand for a low-cost, easy-to-use business intelligence solution. The original version of S2K Analytics was based on QlikView, the enormously successful Windows-based BI solution sold by QlikTech.

Less can be more. Take the Republican presidential candidates, all of whom say the best government is a small government. Corporate performance management (CPM) software as a service provider Adaptive Planning espouses a similar approach. Instead of getting the IT department involved in a big, slow, and expensive implementation of BI software to enable budgeting and financial planning, the company allows CFOs and other financial pros to shortcut the geeks, and control their own destiny.

Rob Hull founded Silicon Valley-based Adaptive Planning in 2003 with two aims in mind. For starters, he was pretty sure that other CFOs were tired

Kawasaki Motors Corp. USA has selected Venyu to provide it with online backup services for its IBM i and Windows servers, the vendor announced last month. After comparing the various online backup providers, Kawasaki says it picked Venyu (formerly AmeriVault) for its capability to house large amounts of data at a reasonable price.

Venyu provides online backup, disaster recovery, and cloud hosting services to about 1,200 companies, primarily along the Gulf Coast and the Eastern Seaboard. As a partner of i365, the vendor uses the EVault online backup technology to move data from its clients’ IBM i, Windows, Unix,

Halcyon Software unveiled a new release of its Audit Journal Manager tool last week that should help IBM i shops keep a close watch on suspicious behavior. Enhancements in the areas of reporting and configuring rule sets should make the software easier to set up, while a performance boost helps the software function in the biggest IBM i environments.

Audit Journal Manager is a multi-pronged security product. Its core function is automatically filtering the millions of entries written to the IBM i OS’s security audit journal (QAUDJRN), and identifying entries that reflect security policy violations. When a security violation is

Open source business intelligence software developer Actuate last week unveiled a new interface for the most popular open source mobile operating system on the planet, Android. BIRT Mobile enables users to consume reports, dashboards, and other BI content from the comfort of their Android phones and tablets.

Actuate is a publicly traded company that develops the free and open source BIRT BI software. The company also sells ActuateOne, a commercial version of the Java-based BIRT that is supported by Actuate.

ActuateOne has supported iOS-based mobile devices for some time with both BIRT and ActuateOne, but the availability of BIRT Mobile

Ryobi Die Casting will implement an IBM i-based ERP system from Solarsoft, the vendor announced recently. The manufacturer will implement iVP across its three plants in Indiana and one plant in Mexico.

Ryobi Die Casting Inc. (USA) manufactures a range of high pressure aluminum die castings for transmission cases and housings, cast engine blocks, steering housings, and structural parts for vehicles. The company, which is a tier-one supplier to the automotive OEMs, is based in Shelbyville, Indiana, where it operates a machining facility and two die casting plants. It also operates a die casting plant and a machining facility

JDA Software Group, which develops enterprise software for large retailers that runs on IBM i and other platforms, set records for its third quarter revenue and earnings, the company said last week. The logistics software company recorded revenue of $171.6 million for its quarter ended September 30, an 8 percent increase from last year, and net income of $16.8 million, a 100 percent increase.

The third quarter was expected to be really good as the result of sales pipeline that JDA three months ago said appeared to be “uncharacteristically strong” at the end of a rotten second quarter, which

Sensage, a developer of security information and event management (SEIM) solutions, says it had a very good third quarter, with a 100 percent increase in sale bookings over the previous quarter, and a 100 percent increase in the number of large deals as well.

Sensage develops SEIM and log management software that helps organizations spot suspicious activity occurring across their IT infrastructure. The company, which can source IBM i security data through one of its 250-plus log adapters, stores data in a patented columnar database that it says scale into the petabyte range.

The Redwood Shores, California, company attributes

Camouflage Software is providing customers with new ways of accessing its data masking functionality–including via API and as a component of an ETL process–with the version 4.2 release of its eponymous Camouflage Data Masking Solution.

Camouflage Software has specialized in data masking since it was called in by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 2001 to assist with the testing of a PeopleSoft application. The Mounties flatly refused to hand over its internal database to test the new application against it, as it would have been a major security breach. Instead, it spent a lot of time and money altering