The equity group behind Infor yesterday announced a $1-billion plan to acquire Geac, a provider of ERP software for numerous platforms, including the iSeries. Golden Gate Capital, the private equity firm that has funded about a dozen Infor acquisitions over the last several years, plans to split Geac up into three components, with System21 and other ERP products going to Infor, and Geac’s industry specific and financial applications becoming two units of a newly created company.

Geac, you will remember, was on the leading edge of the wave of consolidation in the 1990s, when it acquired about 100 software

Keeping large data warehouses up-to-date with the latest data from production systems should be easier for iSeries shops running the new release of RODIN, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool from Coglin Mill. With RODIN V4R1M6, the company has introduced a new capability to identify just the files that have been changed since the last update, saving time and resources during nightly updates.

RODIN is a native OS/400 ETL tool designed specifically for building data warehouses (as well as data marts and operational data stores) on iSeries servers. The tool supports other databases besides DB2/400 as sources of

Information access is a double-edged sword these days. On the one hand, companies should take advantage of the ubiquity of network access to route data from back-office servers to the field, where it can help drive business. On the other hand, new regulations require tighter security measures for sensitive applications and data. Kisco Information Systems is addressing both ends of the information access spectrum with a new version of WebReport/400.

WebReport/400 was initially designed as a way of liberating iSeries reports by eliminating the need to print and mail them to recipients. The product did this by monitoring iSeries output

Thin client devices have had a very attractive value proposition for a number of years. The secure feeling of having no data stored on the desktop, the ease of central management, the high degree of reliability, the cost-saving benefits relating to a modestly lower acquisition cost, a much more significantly reduced total cost of ownership–all of this would seem to put thin clients in a position of rampant growth, much to the dismay of salespeople who fill businesses with PCs.

Although many experts and analysts have predicted for the past several years that the thin client business was on the