High availability software provider Vision Solutions is committed to continuing development of ORION, the i5/OS high availability product it sold before the acquisition of competitor iTera last year. While the iTera HA product will capture the bulk of new sales, Vision currently has no plans to stop selling or end support for ORION, which has about 2,000 users around the globe. To drive the point home, the company issued a new release of ORION yesterday.

Vision Solutions is in the same boat that many ISVs find themselves in after making acquisitions (or, more accurately, after Vision’s parent company, Thoma Cressey

Infor last week revealed its “Open SOA” approach to enabling customers to implement a service oriented architecture (SOA). The i5/OS ERP software giant says Open SOA will give customers flexibility and choice while avoiding the complexity and lock-in that comes with its competitor’s SOA strategies. While Infor didn’t provide specifics on when it will service-enable its myriad ERP products, it says Open SOA will be built into future product upgrades, and be free to customers. The vendor also announced new supply chain and business intelligence applications.

SOA is nothing new to Infor, nor to the companies it has bought. Since

iSeries shops looking to take the next step beyond Query400 into the word of graphical (and still native) i5/OS business intelligence software will be presented the chance as a result of the distribution pact between Information Builders and IBM unveiled last week. As part of the deal, IBM will offer a special version of Info Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence software as an option when users buy a new system or upgrade to a new system.

Information Builders has been in the iSeries business intelligence business for nearly 20 years. Since the AS/400 was first launched in 1988, the New York

Do you have what it takes to leave your green-screen legacy behind and make the move to graphical user interfaces? System i development tool vendor LANSA is betting that you do, and now it’s putting its money where its mouth is to prove it. Last week, LANSA introduced the RAMP Challenge, whereby it will use its Rapid Application Modernization Process toolset to modernize, for free, a portion of your i5/OS application with browser or rich-client interfaces, replete with the latest in Web 2.0 gadgetry.

LANSA announced its RAMP product in March 2006 to provide System i and iSeries shops with

iSeries development tool maker mrc says it has come up with a new way to empower Excel users with the capability to display their data analysis on the Web, using Excel pivot tables, thereby alleviating some of the pain and suffering foisted onto IT administrators by end users.

It’s a common occurrence to see employees pulling data from host systems (such as the iSeries) into desktop products like Excel. Despite the fact that it’s done every day, organizations still suffer from IT maladies as a result of the process, including data integration problems, security issues, and out-of-date information.

While there’s

Seagull Software‘s terminal emulation product for iSeries, zSeries, and Unix hosts, called BlueZone, has been certified by Microsoft to run on Windows Vista, the software vendor announced last week.

When BlueZone version 4.1 ships next month, it will be one of two terminal emulators certified to run on Vista, the new desktop operating system from Microsoft. (The only other emulator to receive the certification is Attachmate‘s EXTRA! X-treme version 9, which Attachmate claims was the first product in any category to gain the certification.)

Microsoft offers two Vista compatibility programs, including “certified for Vista” and “works with Vista.”

Stay-Linked, a new company that eBusiness Solutions Pros (since renamed evolveIT) spun out in January, has issued a new release of Stay-Linked, its eponymous host-based terminal emulation solution for warehouse environments running System i.

Chief among the new enhancements in Stay-Linked version 8 is the new “pool license server,” a new component designed to simplify deployment of Stay-Linked in distributed environments, such as retail chains running multiple warehouses.

“The new pool license server option takes a single Stay-Linked concurrent-user license and automatically distributes user seats to the various remote application hosts dynamically based on demand,” says Mike Pagani,

It’s only been out for a couple of months, but already Applied Logic has issued an enhancement to Pro/Encrypt, a new utility for encrypting DB2/400 data.

Applied Logic launched Pro/Encrypt in January to provide System i and iSeries shops with an affordable way to encrypt valuable data on their servers. The software provides menu-based navigation, support for 128-, 192-, or 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and authentication through symmetric key or pass phrase.

With the new release unveiled last week, Applied Logic has bolstered the product with several enhancements, including a new menu with individual encryption and decryption options, and

Q4bis, a developer of Windows-based business intelligence products, and GSS Group, an iSeries reseller, have teamed up to target users of J.D. Edwards and SYSPRO ERP packages, the two companies announced last week.

Q4bis is a Windows-based business intelligence tool that delivers builds on Microsoft SQL Server 2005’s business OLAP architecture by delivering an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use Windows interface. The product features a DB2/400 connector to pull information from popular ERP systems such as BPCS, J.D. Edwards, and Movex, has been implemented at some OS/400 shops.

As part of the deal, Q4bis and GSS Group will work to incorporate

TomorrowNow is best known as a third-party provider of technical support and maintenance to ERP suites, including J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. Now, the Texas company is touting an internally developed system that continuously monitors the Blackberries and other wireless handheld devices used by its technicians, to ensure that it responds to its clients’ concerns in 30 minutes or less.

When one of TomorrowNow’s customers enters a question or a request through the vendor’s Web site, it kicks off a slew of processes taking place behind the scenes. The bulk of the work is handled by a help desk