• VAI Announces S2K Enterprise Release 5.0.4, Signs New Reseller

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  VAI last month announced a new release of S2K, its line of IBM i-based ERP software. S2K Enterprise Release 5.0.4 brings dozens of enhancements and fixes across all functional areas of the package, including order entry, purchasing, warehouse management, and CRM. The New York company has also signed the Complete IT Store as its latest reseller. S2K Enterprise Release 5.0.4 (or PTF04 for Release 5.0) is the fourth minor release since VAI shipped the monumental S2K version 5.0 back in 2008. With a brand new GUI, a new portal framework, and support for smart phones, version 5 marked a major

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• Connectria Hosting Unveils an IBM i Cloud

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Connectria Hosting, a longtime provider of IBM i server outsourcing services for some very big names, last week announced that it’s making the leap to hosting public and private IBM i clouds. By early June, the St. Louis, Missouri-based company expects its first IBM i cloud offering, dubbed the Silver Cloud, to be ready for new clients, with rates starting at $495 for one/tenth of a processor on a brand-spanking new Power Systems Model 720 running IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. Connectria Hosting knows a thing or two about running production IBM i environments. For the last 14 years,

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• Help/Systems Widens the Robot’s Reach

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use more than one Help/Systems tool to automate data center operations can now view the status of multiple Help/Systems products from a single screen, called the Product Metrics Dashboard, which shipped last month with Robot/NETWORK version 11. The company also unveiled a new release of its cross-platform job scheduler, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, that can control batch jobs running on Microsoft SQL Server. Robot/NETWORK is the digital glue that unites various Help/Systems products running on one or multiple IBM i severs. From one instance of Robot/NETWORK, administrators can send out instructions to–and receive feedback from–multiple IBM i servers,

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• ManageEngine Pushes the Systems Management Envelope

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If you’re in the market for systems management software, but can’t swallow the big license fees and long implementation times of the Big 4, you might want to check out ManageEngine, which purports to offer 80 percent of the functionality of its larger competitors at about 20 percent of the cost. But one functional area where ManageEngine may have an advantage is in the adoption of new technology, such as social media and mobile computing, which ManageEngine is embedding into its products. IBM i shops may know ManageEngine for Applications Manager, which offers the capability to monitor a range

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• Hubspan Sees Growth in Cloud-Based Application Integration

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Application integration is one of those IT disciplines that is begging for simplification. Since the early days of networked business computing, the task of keeping data flowing between applications has been a big pain in the IT department–and a giant source of revenue for service providers. It’s also an area that business process service provider Hubspan sees as a big opportunity to address with its cloud-based integration offering. Hubspan’s flagship platform is a cloud-based integration service called the WebSpan SaaS Integration Platform. The product can be thought of as a hosted EDI translator on steroids. But WebSpan goes beyond moving

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• SQL Conference Puts Spotlight on IBM i

  April 10, 2012 Dan Burger

  Database expertise begins with the ability to analyze database performance and scalability, create new features and functionality, recognize what not to change, and identify where changes are appropriate. And for RPG and COBOL application developers who haven’t already done so, learning SQL and using it to access the DB2 for i (DB2/400) database, is one of the skills that separates the modern programmer from the legacy folks. It’s a foregone conclusion the IBM i shops of the future will have these tools in the shed. It’s with this in mind that System i Developer put together a two-day technical conference

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• Info Builders Adds SaaS Features to BI Software

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Information Builders last week unveiled new features in its flagship WebFOCUS business intelligence software that are designed to help it run in a software as a service (SaaS) environment. WebFOCUS deserves special attention by IBM i shops for two reasons. First, it’s one of the few tier-one business intelligence applications that actually runs on the IBM i server. Secondly, it forms the basis of DB2 Web Query, which IBM sells into the IBM i customer base. Many (but not all) features that first appear in WebFOCUS eventually make it into DB2 Web Query, where they can be utilized by a

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• Micro Focus Updates RUMBA Emulator

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Micro Focus issued new releases of RUMBA and Web-to-Host, its Windows- and Web-based terminal emulators that are popular in IBM i 5250 environments. RUMBA version 8.2, which shipped in November, gains several new features aimed at bolstering user productivity, including: support for IPv6; a new on-screen spell checker that supports a custom dictionary; new support for automatic and dynamic linking; and enhancements to its desktop profile management features. RUMBA 8.2 is also certified for FIPS 140-2, enabling it to be used in government applications. It’s also certified to be compatible with Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), as well as

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• MuleSoft Taps Avalara for Automated Tax Calculation in the Cloud

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The deadline for federal income tax returns is less than a week away, putting millions of Americans under the gun to get their returns finished. And while the tax code isn’t getting any easier to understand, two companies–MuleSoft and Avalara–are partnering to simplify the calculation of taxes with a new solution called iApp4Tax that will streamline the way that business software integrates with Avalara’s tax-calculation service. The new iApp4Tax offering is sold by MuleSoft, a provider of commercial open source integration software called Mule iON that runs in the cloud, or what MuleSoft calls its integration platform as

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• TIBCO to Buy LogLogic

  April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Data broker software developer TIBCO Software will buy log management and security software provider LogLogic, the company announced last week. LogLogic’s products are designed to store and make sense out of large amounts of log data for the purposes of security and regulatory compliance. The company sells pre-configured, Lintel-based appliances fitted with Fibre Channel network cards that can slurp in hundreds of thousands of records per second. The company also sells virtual appliances that customers can install on their own hardware. Some of the company’s offerings are geared to long-term archives, while others are designed for real-time detection of

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