Change management in IBM midrange shops is much more precise than its equivalent on other platforms. It has also been very platform specific. That was all well and good when the platform was dominant in its world. But it’s rarely a standalone platform these days. Development in multiple languages has made single-platform change management too limited. And that’s what led Remain Software to introduce a workflow management product it calls Gravity.

Gravity specializes in process automation, improved collaboration, and smooth communication among development teams. That’s phase one, which is available now. The actual multi-platform capabilities will be introduced later this

Zend Technologies is now shipping Zend Server 6 for IBM i, the newest version of its PHP stack for IBM i environments. As expected, version 6 introduces new ways for IT teams to resolve problems with PHP applications, and works with the mobile interface generation capabilities in Zend Studio 10. The company also introduced new packaging for its IBM i PHP products, delivered a new Web services framework for Zend Server, and launched a new Mobile Smart Start program.

The core capabilities that Zend delivered with Zend Server 6 for IBM i and Zend Studio 10 haven’t changed since we

How does business intelligence and reporting for $125 per user per month sound to you? That’s the starting price for a subscription to NGS-IQ Cloud, the new cloud-hosted business intelligence and reporting solution that New Generation Software and Baseline Data Services unveiled at the COMMON show in Austin, Texas, last week.

Intrepid Four Hundred Stuff readers noticed that NGS has been advertising NGS-IQ Cloud for several months. The company was trying to drum up some interest for the new offering ahead of its official launch this month at COMMON. The NGS-IQ Cloud is now up and running and accepting applications

S4i Systems‘ decision to market its electronic document management system on a subscription basis looks like a well-timed strategy. At the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition last week, there was plenty of talk about hosted services, software as a service, cloud computing, multi-platform reality, and data centers ready to help IBM midrange customers move workloads off-premise. S4i is handling some of this on its own server and has partnered with Baseline Data Services for most of it.

Electronic document management from this IBM i software vendor goes by the name of S4i Express. It consists of modules for document

LANSA last week unveiled Commerce Edition Mobile, a new tool that speeds the creation and deployment of e-commerce enabled mobile applications that can be served from the IBM i platform. The new offering, which was announced at the COMMON conference, combines parts of its LongRange mobile application and LANSA Commerce Edition, and will be available this summer. The company also announced a new release of its core LongRange offering.

Commerce Edition Mobile provides a pre-developed framework on which to build a complete e-commerce storefront that can be delivered as a mobile application. The software runs on the IBM i server,

IBM last week announced that it is now distributing several of ARCAD Software‘s IBM i change management tools along with its Rational Team Concert product. IBM’s announcement of the ARCAD–Rational Power Pack is a tremendous win for ARCAD, and a validation of a decision it made years ago to pursue a Rational-centric strategy.

ARCAD made a decision two years ago to stop competing against IBM and its Rational Team Concert (RTC) product, which IBM launched in late 2008 to provide source control, change management, and build management capabilities.

While other change management software vendors continued to compete with IBM

Halcyon Software got a few things off its plate at the COMMON conference in Austin, Texas, last week. To be exact, the UK-based software firm delivered three new versions of IBM i systems management tools, including Job Scheduler, Authority Swapper, and Document Management System.

The Halcyon folks were good sports at the COMMON show last week, despite losing vice president of sales John Dominic to Maxava just prior to the show, and despite the fact that their entire booth was somehow lost in the mail. While attendees were rightfully impressed with Halcyon’s cardboard-based presentation device, IT Jungle is more interested

In the epic struggle between users and developers, there is a stream of thought among developers that anything they can do to get users out of their hair must be a good and decent thing. To that end, mrc last week unveiled a new feature called user-defined dashboards to its flagship Java Web app generator, m-Power.

Saving developers time and effort has been a goal of michaels, ross, and cole ever since the days when its 4GL environment, Productivity Series, was generating gobs of RPG for clients all over the world. But instead of outputting green-screen 5250 programs, today’s mrc

Comarch, the Polish IT services firm, has acquired a license to Raz-Lee Security‘s IBM i security suite to help protect the i5/OS environment it manages for customers.

Comarch is a Krakow-based company that provides a range of IT services across multiple industries, including ERP management, security, business intelligence, and CRM. The company, which has 3,500 employees, services customers across central Europe, from Russia in the east to Belgium in the west, and it also has offices in the US and the Middle East.

Among the company’s offerings is an insurance processing service that runs on hosted i5/OS machines.

Oracle last week announced a slew of new in-memory applications that will be delivered across its line of ERP and CRM suits. The new in-memory offerings include two JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications that will run in-memory on its new line of all-in-one Engineered Systems.

Oracle has come under pressure from rival SAP to bolster its in-memory offerings, particularly after SAP announced in January that its HANA in-memory database can now be used to run transaction and analytic workloads simultaneously on the same server.

Oracle isn’t trying to combine transactional and analytic workloads at this time. Instead, it’s unveiling new in-memory