• IBM i Support Through 2025? Hold On Just a Second

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Steve Will, IBM‘s chief architect for the IBM i platform, raised a few eyebrows during his presentation to close the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, last Friday. After Will put up a slide that showed a future release of the IBM i OS being supported through the end of 2025, several audience members posted Twitter messages about it. However, in his blog yesterday, Will said to not take the slide at face value. While it’s abundantly used in the IBM i marketplace, Twitter hasn’t been an especially fruitful avenue for dispensing actual news that affects

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• IBM Ships a Fix for Bugs in RDP 8.5

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week issued a fixpack for Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP) that addresses some of the shortcomings that developers have complained about with RDP version 8.5, a major new release of the IDE that was released earlier this year. In particular, Fixpack 1, or RDP version 8.5.1. If the complaints that RDP users posted to the Midrange.com mailing list are any indication, RDP 8.5 was an exceptionally buggy release. Users posting to WDSCI-L (the product was formerly the WebSphere Developer Studio Client) complained about a number of problems with the integrated development environment (IDE). One of the most

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• InterForm Launches Embedded PDF

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The big “turducken” craze has passed, to the great relief of responsible foodies and heart surgeons everywhere. But the business IT equivalent of turducken–stuffing business documents inside of other business documents–is just taking off. IBM i document management software vendor InterForm is one of the first companies to take advantage of the new capability in the PDF standard that enables users to literally stuff other documents–including Word docs, TIFFS, XLS spreadsheets, or other PDFs–right into a PDF. InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen says the new Embedded PDF software will be a big timesaver for accounting departments that are constantly fetching old

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• Kronos Launches HR App for iPad

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Kronos last month rolled out a new app that allow users of its iSeries Central suite to access their human resources software from an iPad. The new app, called Workforce Tablet, provides access to command HR management tasks, such as approving timecards or shifting worker schedules around, and also includes basic analytic functionality. The $870 million company also made several other announcements at its annual KronosWorks conference. Workforce Tablet is a native iOS app designed to provide managers and employees with access to Kronos’ server-based HR and human capital management (HCM) suites, including iSeries Central and Workforce Central, from an

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• Infor Partners with NCS for Direct Store Delivery

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor last month announced a partnership with Numeric Computer Systems that will result in new integration between Infor ERP systems and the suite of Direct Store Delivery applications from NCS. One Infor LX (BPCS) customer, the beverage bottler Polar Corporation, has already adopted the integration. Direct Store Delivery (DSD) is a business model whereby manufacturers act as their own distributors and ship their products directly to stores or the place of consumption. The business model is commonly used in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, where delivery times are critical. After all, fresh milk and eggs can’t sit in

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• Deploy Cognos in Minutes with New BI Pattern, IBM Says

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Critics have long derided the long deployment times typically required by big business intelligence offerings such as IBM‘s Cognos. However, with last week’s launch of Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0, IBM says it has cut the deployment of a full, fault-tolerant Cognos environment to a matter of minutes. Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0 is a new piece of software designed to speed up the deployment of Cognos business intelligence applications on IBM’s new PureApplication server platform. PureApplication servers, you will remember, are all-in-one systems that don’t run applications so much as they run “patterns of expertise.” That concept-bending scheme

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• Island Pacific Turns iPhone Into POS Device

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Imagine being able to check out of a store this Christmas shopping season by completing a transaction with an iPhone app, as opposed to lining up at the check-out counter. That future is becoming a reality at retail chains that are customers of Island Pacific, a developer of merchandising and point of sale solutions. Island Pacific recently announced that it has received accreditation from a payment network provider for use of its Island Pacific Mobile offering, which utilizes software running on an iPhone or iPod Touch and the Ingenico iSMP mobile payment cradle. Ingenico’s iSMP device turns an iPhone

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• EVault Taps Cequel Data Centers for Cloud Partnership

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  EVault last week announced that it has formed a partnership with Cequel Data Centers, owner of a series of data centers in Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington state, to offer EVault’s online backup and recovery software and services from each of its locations. Cequel Data Centers was created in 2010 by a group of private equity and investment firms, led by Cequel III of St. Louis, Missouri. The group owns and operates more than 100,000 square feet of data center space through three subsidiaries, including Colo4 of Dallas Texas, which was acquired in 2010; Perimeter Technology of Oklahoma City and Tulsa,

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• Profound Logic Opts for RPG OA in NiSUG Mobile Challenge

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic showcased its RPG Open Access (RPG OA) technology during the recent mobile application development challenge held during National iSystems User Group‘s 2012 International Power event in London. NiSUG challenged IBM i tool vendors to use their wares to quickly develop the most full-featured mobile application they could as part of the “App-i-Days Mobile Application Showcase” that was held on the expo floor during the recent 2012 International Power event. The vendors, presented with a DB2 for i database and a set of minimum requirement, unleashed their developers and their creativity. Profound Logic, which was represented by its

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• IBM Fights Fraud with New Software

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week launched a new release of i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, its Windows-based software application that’s designed to help organizations discover, fight, and prevent fraud. The new release brings a new architecture that should improve scalability and data integration. It can be very difficult to detect fraud, especially when it’s being perpetrated by small groups of highly skilled and motivated people against large organizations that have rigid processes and are slow to react. With i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, IBM hopes to give these large organizations a leg up on the game by giving them powerful tools designed to peer

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