Jack Crouch, chief technology officer at diesel equipment manufacturer Stewart & Stevenson, says he would buy third party maintenance for his company’s OneWorld XE application “in a heartbeat.” He hasn’t, however, for one reason: service packs. “No one but Oracle owns source to the J.D. Edwards kernel,” he says. So when IBM changes to OS/400 hurt compatibility with his ERP implementation, such as it did with i5/OS, Crouch relies on his ERP vendor to issue a service pack.

JDE customers like Crouch are increasingly looking to third party maintenance providers to keep their ERP systems up-to-date with things like tax

Now iSeries shops looking to replace their tape-based backups with a new disk-to-disk, or a disk-to-disk-to-tape, back-up solution may want to check out Neartek‘s Virtual Storage Engine. VSE2 was granted TotalStorage Proven certification from IBM for its eServer range last month. With its capability to emulate practically any type of tape drive, as well as wide cross-platform support, the VSE2 software is designed to speed back-up times while reducing costs in heterogeneous IT environments.

New federal laws like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley are driving the need for information lifecycle management policies at many companies these days. Neartek says VSE2 can

Gumbo Software is making it easier for customers to distribute their spool files, with recent updates to its spool file tools for OS/400. In January, the Seattle software company started shipping new releases of two products, SpoolMail V2R1 and Spool-a-Matic V1R8, which both gained the capability to split OS/400 spool files, among other enhancements.

Spool-a-Matic is a utility for converting OS/400 spool files into PC formats that can be more easily distributed and read by an OS/400 shop’s customers and business partners. After converting the spool file into PDF, RTF, HTML, or TIFF format, the product places the file in

Cybele Software recently launched a new version of its TN Bridge Integration Pack product that allows organizations to Web-enable and reuse their legacy 5250 and 3270 applications as Web services. TN Bridge Integration Pack Version 3.0, which the Delaware software company officially introduced in December, adds new components for Web-enabling legacy applications using the latest Microsoft .NET and Borland Delphi development tools.

Cybele Software was founded in 2002 and is based in Wilmington, Delaware. It’s the North American affiliate of Team Soft S.R.L., a Buenos Aires, Argentina, software developer that has been in the AS/400 business since 1993. About 70