IBM has promised its customers, its resellers, and its employees that it would not make substantial changes to the iSeries server line in 2005, so don’t get worried. IBM is not going to suddenly reconfigure the boxes or their pricing as part of its summer announcements today. But the company is going to nip and tuck here and there to make the iSeries a better fit for customers and partners.

To that end, IBM is announcing new configurations of the i5 520 Value and Express servers, is unveiling a Solution Edition of the i5 520 server, and is simplifying the

Software vendors are responding to the rash of high profile data losses by large corporations and the exploding problem of identity theft with new products designed to lock down access to business applications. IBM, BMC Software, and M-Tech introduced new single sign-on (SSO) and user administration products last month as companies look for ways to control access to data and applications.

In the recent past, the gory details of major security lapses at American corporations were rarely reported. Security software vendors occasionally would describe how clients had lost data or been hacked, but it was taboo for the

Seagull Software wasted no time last month rolling out a new suite of business process management (BPM) tools just weeks after acquiring BPM software maker Oak Grove Systems and integrating that technology into LegaSuite, Seagull’s flagship collection of application modernization and integration tools for iSeries and other hosts. With LegaSuite BPM, Seagull now offers organizations the capability to integrate human decision-making into newly created business process workflows, something the company says is lacking in other BPM products.

Atlanta-based Seagull acquired California-based Oak Grove Systems four weeks ago for an undisclosed sum of money (see “Seagull Acquires Oak Grove for BPM

System Objects wants to put a new graphical interface on your RPG and COBOL applications, and it has several ways to do it. The French company recently started shipping a new release of Delphi/400, its add-on to Borland‘s Delphi IDE that brings DB2/400 access to Windows applications developed with that IDE. Or if Java, Visual Basic, or C++ is your thing, System Objects has add-ons that bring low-level DB2/400 access to those environments, too.

Delphi/400 is a Microsoft Windows-oriented development tool that plugs into Borland’s fourth-generation language (4GL) IDE and brings low-level OS/400 and DB2/400 access to thick and