Today is the big day. i5/OS V6R1 is finally being launched by IBM. The operating system for iSeries and System i servers, which has been under development for years and which Big Blue previewed last summer, is formally announced today and will begin shipping on March 21. That’s just before the i5/OS and OS/400 faithful are gathered for the now-annual COMMON user group conference and expo, this time being hosted down in Nashville, Tennessee. Giving IBM’s techies plenty of time to get their presentations together to show off all the new features and functions.

There are a lot of

Remember the System i-based voice over IP (VoIP) solution for small and mid size businesses that IBM and Nortel announced seven months ago? While the companies didn’t get the offering, dubbed Nortel-IBM System i Unified Communications, out before the end of the year as planned, both firms are still planning to get the product into customers hands, hopefully by the time spring rolls around.

IBM has been pushing into the VoIP area for the last couple of years, as businesses have started to deploy VoIP solutions that allow them to replace their physical PBX switches with more advanced software-based telephone

At the turn of the millennium, IT shops were scrambling to deploy firewalls and other devices to stop hackers from infiltrating their servers. Over the ensuing years, network security professionals got very good at locking down their charges. As a result, hackers have moved onto more productive pastures, including exploiting vulnerabilities in Web applications themselves. This has given rise to a new security device: the Web application firewall. The question is: Do you need one?

It’s staggering how far the IT industry has come in the last eight years, and how quickly the Internet has evolved. What started as a

As an IT pro, you’ve witnessed the state of near chaos that many IT shops call the norm. Projects go off-track like clockwork, budgets balloon to stratospheric levels, and management keeps dreaming up new projects with unrealistic goals. All the while, you must keep the “legacy” stuff running. If this sounds too much like your shop, you could be a good candidate for Project Portfolio Management (PPM), a discipline that Innotas is bringing to the software as a service (SaaS) world.

Long ago, during the wild-west frontier days of IT project management near the turn of the century, spreadsheets were

Oracle yesterday unveiled a new release of tools and technology underlying its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne suite of ERP applications. With JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools version 8.97, customers gain several new capabilities, including better support for Oracle’s operating system, database, and middleware platforms, in addition to features like support for the Firefox Web browser, better service oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities, and a new Web-based console for administrators.

Like other ERP vendors, Oracle takes a two-fold approach to delivering software updates to its customers. By delivering tools separate from business logic, Oracle ensures that the task of supporting EnterpriseOne applications across the

Stylus Studio recently announced a new release of its suite of tools for working with XML, XQuery, Web services, and XML technologies. The latest release, Stylus Studio 2008 XML Enterprise Suite, features improved support for heterogeneous environments. And one System i shop as already found the tools worthwhile.

Stylus Studio 2008 is a suite of software that provides developers with a plethora of tools for doing all kinds of stuff with XML. Did we say plethora? How about an embarrassing overabundance, per this list of more than 400 XML capabilities on the vendor’s Web site. If it can be done

Turf wars between IBM and Microsoft in the unified communications area flared up again last week as both sides shoveled success stories as if they were possessed by fire-breathing marketing demons (which they are). Last week we reported that Microsoft threw cold water on the IBM Lotusphere event by announcing a significant number of Lotus users had converted to Microsoft in the past year. This week, IBM is claiming that “nearly one-third of new Lotus Sametime customers were Microsoft Exchange shops.” Believe what you want to believe, but don’t take any of these numbers too seriously.

In this latest episode,

The version 12 release of Clementine, the data mining software developed by SPSS, will be adapted to support the i5/OS operating system later this year, the company confirmed recently.

SPSS bills Clementine as a data mining workbench that enables organizations to develop and deploy predictive data mining models. With Clementine’s predictive models sifting through an organization’s data and identifying patterns, managers can gain greater insight into the organizations’ business and make smarter decisions.

Clementine is commonly used in financial services organizations to predict which customers are good investments and which ones are likely to end up with outstanding balances.

EXTOL last week rolled out a new collection of products aimed at solving business-to-business integration problems. The new offerings, called Business Extenders, are subsets of EXTOL’s full suite of integration software that are designed to tackle single-issue problems, like converting orders arriving via Excel spreadsheets into EDI formats.

EXTOL has been developing native OS/400 and i5/OS EDI translation tools for decades. More recently, as B2B communication has evolved, EXTOL has added support for technologies such as XML, AS2, and GSM1, to its flagship integration broker, the Java-based EXTOL Business Integrator suite of tools.

Last week, the Pennsylvania company announced it

FalconStor Software last week unveiled a new release of its virtual tape library (VTL) offering, FalconStor VTL Enterprise Edition version 5. With the new VTL, FalconStor has bolstered its support for data de-duplication, a critical feature for minimizing the amount of data backed up, and added other new features.

FalconStor’s VTL offerings streamline customers’ backups by moving data directly to disk arrays instead of backing it up directly to tapes, which are notoriously unreliable. The company sells this capability through its flagship VTL software product, called IPStor, as well as through its VTL Enterprise Edition hardware-based offerings. All of its