There’s an old adage that says a picture is worth a thousand words. SkyView Partners is betting that a picture–namely, a graphical user interface (GUI)–is worth much, much more than that to the IT managers tasked with maintaining regulatory compliance in System i servers. To that end, SkyView yesterday started shipping Policy Minder 1.4, which includes a new Web-based GUI that should make it much easier to get one or more i OS servers into compliance, and to keep them there.

SkyView Partners launched Policy Minder three years ago to help System i shops automate the process of monitoring compliance

Gillani recently announced the pending availability of its iDistribute suite of enterprise applications on IBM‘s Power Systems server. With its suite of financials and supply chain management software running across the Power Systems’ three operating systems–i, AIX, and Linux–Gillani says it’s poised to give the big ERP vendors a run for their money.

Gillani (pronounced with a soft “g”) was founded 25 years ago as an accounting software provider, Softa Associates. The company later changed its name to FourGen Software to reflect its new fourth-generation language (4GL) development tools for the Informix database, called FourGen CASE Tools, which the

Hotels and resort operators that use the Stratton Warren System (SWS) to manage their supplies will gain some new tricks for spotting and eliminating wasteful spending with version SWS 8.0, which was announced by Agilysys last week. Support for EDI, new budgeting capabilities, and dashboard applications combine to help the casino resorts and large hotels that use SWS to weather the economic downturn.

SWS (formerly MMS400) is a suite of inventory management applications designed for large hotels and casino resorts that cater to tens of thousands of guests and manage relationships with hundreds of suppliers. The software runs exclusively on

Seagull Software took a look back at its System i roots, and decided that it’s still a good place to be. As a result, you can expect to hear more System i-related news from Seagull, including a new integration workbench that plugs into the Eclipse framework that will be launched in the months ahead, according to the company.

“We’ve ignored the iSeries market for all kinds of good and bad reasons,” Ardy Franssen, Seagull’s vice president of product management, told IT Jungle in a recent in interview. “Since we were acquired by Rocket, we have not given the AS/400

The slumping economy has dropped Las Vegas tourism 10 percent, a decline not seen since 9/11, but that isn’t stopping the gambling industry from showing off the latest and greatest technology at the Global Gaming Expo, which is being held today through Thursday in Sin City. The big dog of the market, Bally Technologies, will also be flashing some new goods, including a new release of its i OS-based casino management software, a new command and control center, and, of course, lots and lots of new slot machines.

Bally provides a variety of products to casinos. While players may

RJS Software recently introduced a new release of the Windows-based version of WebDocs, a document management solution that can help to manage output from Windows as well as System i applications. Customers adopting the new version will see more powerful searches, easier integration with ERP systems, and a cleaner user interface, among other enhancements, RJS says.

RJS Software targets multiple platforms with many of its products, including document management, workflow, reporting, and forms tools. For some of these products, such as WebDocs, RJS maintains entirely separate code for the i OS and Windows versions. For other products, such as iForms,

LANSA yesterday unveiled a new white paper that seeks to address how System i shops can build an enterprise application architecture that works in concert with software from Microsoft. A properly conceived architecture, LANSA argues, can accelerate the selection of tools to automate application development, and enable System i organizations to adapt their IT systems more quickly and efficiently.

LANSA brought in recognized System i expert Paul Conte to write “The Eight Pillars of an Enterprise Application Architecture: Building a Stable and Agile Software Foundation in a Dynamic IBM i and Microsoft World.”

In the 20-page paper, Conte argues

ClarkWestern Building Systems, a manufacturer of lath and steel framing systems, is migrating ERP systems. As a result, it will rely on Inovis‘ managed services offering to run its i OS-based EDI system, Inovis announced recently.

ClarkWestern is a privately held manufacturer based in Middletown, Ohio, whose steel framing and accessories have been used on some notable projects, such as the Enron Building in Houston, Texas (now called the Chevron/Texaco Tower).

Like many mid size manufacturers, the company relied on the IBM midrange server to manage parts of its business. For communication with trading partners using EDI, ClarkWestern relied

GroundWork last week announced the pre-release of GroundWork Monitor Community Edition 5.3, a new version of the company’s open source systems management software that works with all major operating systems, including IBM i. With version 5.3, the company is bringing together the latest releases of many of the open source components that make up its GroundWork suite, and threatening the hegemony of the Big Four.

GroundWork is a San Francisco-based developer of open source systems management software. The company relies on a community of experts and enthusiasts–including the popular Ganglia, Nagios, NeDi, and Cacti open source projects–to

Curious about what undiscovered IT assets might be lurking in your data center, and what relationship they have with the systems you work with everyday? Tideway Systems, a provider of application dependency mapping (ADM) software, yesterday announced the beta for Foundation Community Edition, a new product aimed at helping small and mid size shops better understand their systems.

Tideway’s Foundation series automatically provides data center discovery capabilities to help customers create an inventory of all the servers, applications, and network nodes in their IT environments, as well as mapping inter-system dependencies and relationships. The software helps administrators pinpoint weaknesses