• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• SAP Agrees To Pay Oracle $359 Million To Settle TomorrowNow Suit

  November 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The long-running lawsuit between ERP giants Oracle and SAP is finally over after SAP agreed to pay Oracle about $359 million in exchange for dropping its suit over the TomorrowNow third-party support business. The amount is significantly less than $1.3 billion award that a federal court jury initially awarded Oracle back in 2010. But it’s a bit more than the $272 million Oracle had on the table in 2011 after a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California threw out the $1.3 billion award, calling it “grossly excessive.” The lawsuit stretches all the way

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• Microsoft Loves Linux. Who Would Have Thought That?

  November 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  There’s no shortage of open source software in the IBM midrange community. Examples can be found if you are enthusiastic about looking for them. And IBM likes to nuzzle up to open source as much as possible. One reason is because it can differentiate itself from Microsoft and unload the proprietary insults at the campus in Redmond. So even though there is a pretty strong hatred for Microsoft in the IBM i community, the news that Microsoft is embracing open source–on some of its server side components–is interesting in that it indicates the impact open source is having on the

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• IT Operational Budgets Slowly Climbing, Says Computer Economics

  November 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  The IT spending calculators have been hot and cold in 2014. Spending is up compared to 2013, but overall growth is a little too flat to make everyone happy. You’ll find some folks with smiles on their faces though and some projects that needed to get done have found the road to completion. The early outlook for 2015 is once again indicating the sun will shine if you look in the right places, but overall the IT community won’t be dancing in the streets. Some of the right places to look, according to forecasters at Computer Economics, are innovations

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