• Premise Keeps Tabs on IBM i Cloud with Custom Dashboard

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Premise, a managed service provider (MSP) based in Clearwater, Florida, have built a nifty Web dashboard that tells them all they need to know about the IBM i environments they manage for clients. From ASP usage and MIMIX replication status to rack configs and cache battery status, the dashboard gives Premise engineers and customers instant answers to many of the most commonly asked questions. What’s more, the dashboard may soon be available for any IBM i shop to purchase. Premise is an IBM Premier Business Partner with expertise in hosting IBM i, xSeries, storage, and MIMIX

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• CA Opens 2E Arrays to Outside Web Services

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the 2E development environment released by CA earlier this year makes it easier for organizations to expose 2E business logic to the outside world through Web services. The new Enhanced Array support added to 2E version 8.6 marks a fundamental change in the product, and marks the beginning of a new era in how 2E shops will develop and maintain their IBM i applications in the future. Array programming is well-suited to fourth-generation languages (4GLs) like 2E because it enables lots of individual pieces of data to be updated simultaneously with a single operation. Numerous programming

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• Tableau Attracts Big Attention for Unique Approach to Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  One business intelligence software vendor that has been garnering big headlines lately is Tableau Software. The Seattle, Washington, company says it has come up with a better way for users to not only explore their large data sets, but to display the information in a visually compelling way. The software is being used with data from IBM i servers, but there’s more that could be done to streamline the connection, a Tableau manager says. Tableau started as a research project of Chris Stolte, a graduate student at Stanford University who was researching and studying under professor Pat Hanrahan, who

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• RedPrairie to Buy JDA for $1.9 Billion

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  JDA Software, a publicly held developer of retail management and supply chain planning software, has agreed to be bought by RedPrairie, a privately held developer of supply chain execution and warehouse management software, for $1.9 billion. When fully merged, the new RedPrairie will have about $1 billion in annual revenue, and compete globally with Oracle and SAP. However, a wide mix of platforms used by both companies raises new questions on the long-term plan for JDA’s loyal IBM i customer base. Rumors started swirling a week ago that JDA Software had hired JPMorgan Chase to handle JDA’s

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• MSPs Expand IBM i DR and HA Practices

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  If there’s a silver lining to the giant cloud that was Superstorm Sandy, it’s that it has shined a light on the need for companies to establish and practice disaster recovery (DR) plans. IBM i shops are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) to assist with their DR and high availability (HA) planning. In recent weeks, three MSPs, including Corus360, Recovery Point, and DataStorage Corp., announced upgrades to their DR and HA practices. Corus360 is a large Atlanta, Georgia-based value added reseller (VAR) with a subsidiary called RES-Q that provides a range of DR and business

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• Infor Gives EAM an iPad Interface

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations using enterprise asset management (EAM) software from Infor can now interact with that software through an iPad, the company announced last week. EAM Mobile provides an extension to several Infor EAM products, and will be particularly beneficial to workers in the field or remote locations. Infor offers several EAM products, including EAM Enterprise, EAM Enterprise Sustainability, and MP2. All of the products are based on the MP2 software that Infor obtained with its Datastream acquisition in 2006; it rebranded it EAM Enterprise in 2007. Both products run only on Windows and Unix servers, but as Infor10 applications, they can

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• Zend Debuts Studio 10 Beta

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Zend Technologies used its annual ZendCon conference last month to unveil beta releases of three products, including Zend Studio 10, Zend Server 6, and Zend Server Gateway. While Zend wants customers to use all three products together, IBM i shops will be most interested in the beta of Zend Studio, which brings new cloud, mobile, and productivity features. Zend Studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a spectrum of tools for rapidly writing rich Internet applications, with PHP back ends, JavaScript and JQuery front ends, and REST Web services connecting them. Studio offers productivity features like code

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• Halcyon Delivers Japanese Version of Management Tools

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i systems management tool vendor Halcyon Software last month announced that its software is now available in the Japanese language. The U.K. firm says its complete line of products are now available in Japan, the second largest IBM i market in the world, after the United States. Halcyon says it did the development work of modifying its software to support double byte character sets (DBCS), while its Japanese partner SOLPAC, a Tokyo-based software and consulting firm that caters to the IBM midrange market, did the translation work. SOLPAC will sell Halcyon products in Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. “Halcyon

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• EMC Grabs Silver Tail to Fight Cyber Crime

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The world of cyber fraud and cyber warfare is undergoing a period of rapid transformation and expansion, and with last week’s acquisition of Web fraud detection company Silver Tail Systems, EMC shows that it plans to be in the thick of the battles. Cyber criminals are increasingly using sophisticated technology and novel approaches–such as blended attacks and polymorphic malware–to gain an edge over the good guys and crack the security of the good guys. The problem is that traditional signature-based security tools are no longer sufficient to differentiate between regular Web sessions and malicious Web sessions. This is especially

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• AquaFold Power Tool Gets Hip to Big Data

  November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Programmers and administrators faced with big data movement tasks may find the job a little easier with the latest release of AquaFold Aqua Data Studio, a power tool that provides graphical access to major databases, including DB2/400. Aqua Data Studio is a Java-based utility designed to provide programmers, database developers, and systems administrators with a single, consistent interface to work with databases. The product’s GUI lets users administer, explore, and query their databases and create SQL scripts. Additionally, it offers an entity relationship modeler; brings comparison tools for analyzing differences in files, directory structures, and database schemas; and has an

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