The IT Jungle

SoCal Water District Taps Bytware for Server Monitoring

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

The extreme drought that has engulfed California is forcing everybody to conserve. For citizens, that means using less water and (the horror!) installing artificial turf. Faced with lower revenues, local water districts have also tightened their belts.

Coachella Valley Water District provides water to people through 2,000 miles of piping covering a 1,000-square-mile area near Palm Springs, one of the driest places on earth. Conservation of precious resources like water is a way of life there.

At the CVWD, conservation of IT resources is also a way of life. The organization is able to maintain a slim IT staff, in

CNX Goes Native with Mobile Framework

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

CNX is gearing up to release a native application for smartphones and tablets with the next release of its application development framework for IBM i customers.

With the launch of Valence 4.1, which is slated to become available in mid-November, CNX will, for the first time, offer its mobile portal as a native smartphone app. The company will be targeting iOS first, to be followed by Android support in 2015.

“The big news is that we’re introducing a native iOS portal app for accessing the IBM i server instance,” says Robert Swanson, a senior partner with CNX. “The new native

HiT Hooks HANA to Other Databases with DBMoto

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

You can do a lot with SAP HANA sitting all by itself, including running transactional and analytical applications on the same set of data, which is a pretty neat trick. But in the real world, most SAP HANA customers need a way to move data in and out of HANA as quickly as possible. That’s where the latest release of HiT Software‘s DBMoto software comes in.

Last week HiT Software, which is a subsidiary of BackOffice Associates, announced that the latest release of its DBMoto ETL tool has been certified to integrate with SAP HANA. That means HANA

Midrange Dynamics Expands IBM i and Multi-Platform App Dev Capabilities

November 18, 2014 Dan Burger

Single-platform application development is a weed that won’t be pulled out of the garden. It’s not going away any time soon. But multi-platform development has been increasing and continues to expand–often in individual silos, but increasingly seen in multi-team, cross-platform, unified development environments. The idea that development environments have specific strengths and weaknesses and each has its place if you can manage the integration is not a new idea, but it is more widely acknowledged.

Productivity and integration are the two key ingredients in modern development environments. You’ve probably heard arguments that developers are most productive using tools they’re most

ShowCase 10 Gets a Little Help from Friends

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

HelpSystems last week issued a new release of ShowCase, the suite of business intelligence tools that it acquired last year from IBM. With ShowCase 10, HelpSystems borrowed the user interfaces from its SEQUEL product line, which gives ShowCase customers spiffier features like drill downs and pivot tables. ShowCase also got a little help from another sister company for report distribution and scheduling.

HelpSystems’ April 2013 transaction with IBM, you will recall, netted three major products, all of which run on Windows but are almost exclusively used by IBM i customers. These included Query, which allows users to generate

Boost Your IBM i Security by Tracking Config Changes

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

One of the most important aspects of IBM i security is having the right configuration. But configurations rarely stay static, and as they change, so does your level of security protection. Kisco Information Systems last week launched a new tool called iSecMap that helps IBM i shops map how configurations change over time and how they might have opened up security problems along the way.

The IBM i server has a great reputation as a very secure platform on which to run your business. However, the server does not ship from the factory with a strong security turned on by

Profound Reveals Flexible Code Generator for RPG and PHP

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

One of the toughest parts of beginning an application modernization initiative is just knowing where to start. To give IBM i developers a head start, Profound Logic last week officially unveiled JumpStart, a new code generator that outputs basic RPG and PHP programs, complete with a modern Web or mobile interface. But unlike other code generators, the company says JumpStart gives you full control over how the resulting code looks.

JumpStart is the latest addition to ProfoundUI, the company’s tool for creating modern user interfaces using RPG Open Access technology. The company decided to build JumpStart after several clients asked

Maxava Gooses IFS Replication Performance for HA

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

Maxava is gearing up to give its high availability customers a significant boost in how quickly they can replicate and apply changes to data stored in the IFS. The move from a single-threaded apply process to a multi-threaded apply process should give customers sufficient performance overhead to ensure that IFS replication doesn’t become a bottleneck as IFS data volumes continue to grow.

IBM i shops are being swept up into the big data explosion that’s currently rippling across our world and our data centers. Today they’re generating, processing, storing, and reporting on much larger volumes than they did just a

Oracle Takes JD Edwards Into the Rental Business

November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

JD Edwards ERP software has been used in a lot of industries over the decades, including the manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, retail, and media industries. This month, JDE owner Oracle took the venerable brand into a new industry: equipment rental.

The new EnterpriseOne Rental Management offering is a customized version of the ERP system designed for use by companies that rent a variety of gear, including heavy equipment, medical equipment, oil and gas equipment, mining equipment, and construction equipment.

The software manages many aspects of running a rental business, including writing rental contacts and agreements, reservations for future rentals, inventory management,