• VAI: 30 Years Old, and Counting

  July 22, 2008 Alex Woodie

  When Bob Vormittag founded VAI (formerly Vormittag & Associates) as a small software development company for the IBM System 3 line in 1978, he didn’t envision what it would become. Now, as VAI celebrates its 30th birthday this month, the company took a minute to ponder its past, and consider what the future will bring. VAI is one of the remaining independent, middle-tier ERP developers serving the System i community. The company, which is based in Ronkonkoma, New York (on Long Island), develops a suite of RPG-based applications called S2K Enterprise that are used by more than 750 companies. VAI’s

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• Relativity Teams with ILOG for Business Rule Modernization

  July 22, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Relativity Technologies, a developer of tools to allow programmers to gain a better understanding of applications, has teamed up with ILOG, a developer of business rules management systems, to help customers modernize their legacy systems, the two vendors announced last week. With its Modernization Workbench, Relativity is in the business of “knowledge mining.” The software enables owners of so-called “legacy” applications running on System i, System z, Unix, and Windows systems, to dig deep into the code to see how the various components of the application work and where the business logic is buried. After unearthing this crucial

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• i OS Products on Display in Upcoming Vendor Webcasts

  July 22, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Interested in learning some new techniques for improving your System i data processing? Curious about how different products can make your job easier? If so then you should check out some of the free Webcasts that System i ISVs are hosting this week, as tracked by our sister publication, Four Hundred Monitor. This week features a bountiful crop of Webcasts, Webinars, and assorted online get-togethers from independent software vendors. It kicks off today with a Webinar at noon EDT from Quadrant Software on the topic of paperless purchase-to-pay processes. Go to www.quadrantsoftware.com/tracking/2008_03/tech_tools_q308/index.html to register. Developers interested in learning how

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• What the Heck Is the Midrange, Anyway?

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a story we hear again and again from the IT vendors: They are going to double down and make aggressive moves into the small and medium business space because the growth rates for IT spending are higher than they are among larger enterprises, at least when those businesses are all lumped together. To many of us, who remember the minicomputer revolution and who know a thing or two about the midrange market, such statements seem a little odd. The midrange systems and now, server, market and its customer base has always been important. The midrange products from IBM

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• More Power7 Details Emerge, Thanks to Blue Waters Super

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers. And so it is with IBM‘s future Power7

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• IBM Drives Home a Strong Second Quarter Across the Board

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done. Mark Loughridge,

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• The X Factor: The IT Department Matters as Much as the CIO

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it–or a mix, if they use a mixed model–because these are the people who either cut

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• IT Jobs Grow in the U.S. Despite Economic Woes

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good. In fact, in terms of the increase in IT jobs in the United States, the news has been good for a while. The

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• BluePhoenix Says Business Is Steady, Sells Mainsoft Stake

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Legacy application modernization tool maker BluePhoenix Solutions is getting ready to report its financial results for the second quarter of 2008, and as is the tradition for public companies, BluePhoenix put out a statement going over preliminary results in conjunction with a big announcement that it was looking to sell its stake in Mainsoft, a maker of .NET and Java tools. The preliminary report was designed to calm down a jittery Wall Street. BluePhoenix, which is based in Herzliya, Israel, did most of its business in the mainframe market until last summer when it acquired ASNA, which has

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• IBM Opens Up the EGL Cafe, But Will People Stop By?

  July 21, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I know, I know. The last thing in the world you want to hear about is the need to learn a new programming language. Or, if you are an IT manager, to pay in terms of time and money to get your programming staff trained on a new language. But this is what IBM is asking customers to do with Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), the heart of Web application development in its recently upgraded set of Rational tools. Half the battle of getting companies to even look at a programming language, much less using it, is to convince programmers that

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