System iNetwork

January 2008

January 29, 2008 4:36 PM

Trending the "S" Words: 2008 May Be Better Than You Fear

Because it's January and everyone’s still in the "Best of '07/What’s Hot in '08" mode, I thought I'd take a look at some trends in the three perennial "S" issues in the System i market and IT in general: spending, security, and storage. Although the sources of information come from outside our market, for the most part these definitely apply to the System i.

Despite being largely conducted before the latest U.S. recession scare became vogue, AMR Research released its annual report last week on IT spending for SMBs. AMR's encouraging word is that 64 percent of SMBs say that they plan to increase IT spending in 2008, by an average of 5.3 percent. Plans are evenly split between companies wanting to fund applications that simply help them run their businesses and companies that want applications to support innovation and spur growth. The largest single application type being planned, cited by 18 percent of respondents, was customer-management applications, with business-intelligence and business performance-management apps second and third. If SMBs hold to just half that growth, that will still be progress.

Security is an ongoing concern for everyone. Amplitude Research is a Florida survey research organization that formed a 10,000-member IT panel in 2002 divided evenly between C-level execs, developers and database administrators, systems and network administrators, CEOs of small technology companies, and other IT professionals such as tech support specialists and intranet managers. A survey of 350 members showed that in 2007 two-thirds reported at least one unauthorized intrusion into company systems, 52 percent of which involved "sensitive" or "highly sensitive" data that might have been lost.

What’s interesting to me is that aside from well-publicized disasters such as the U.K.'s National Audit Office losing two CDs containing personal information of more than two million families last fall, you don’t hear much about data losses except for a few specific horror stories. However, when people participate in a survey in which they don't have to publicly identify their company and suddenly two out of three are admitting a problem, doesn't that smack of a dirty little secret nearly everyone's sharing without admitting it?

Not saying it publicly to avoid panicking the shareholders combined with lots of back-patting about how strong System i security is seem to conspire to create an "it isn’t really happening here" mentality among too many in our market. System i security is good, but it’s not perfect. Strong compliance products, encryption algorithms for databases and backup media, malware protection, and intrusion-prevention solutions should be high on everyone’s investigation lists for 2008. Already having one type of solution doesn’t preclude the need for the others.

I know I'm covering familiar ground so far, but there's another aspect to this that not everyone seems to grasp yet. Cool stuff that's still mostly on the System i horizon, such as social networking software and wikis, as well as great concepts such as enterprise search, and the growing use of such personal conveniences as smart phones in a business setting, all have their own security vulnerabilities. Social networking sites are starting to have trouble with identity theft of their members. Wikis are a great way to share information, but they're vulnerable to the same kinds of information-sharing abuse as uncontrolled FTP. Enterprise search lets employees find data they need but sometimes lets them see too much confidential data because maybe someone doesn't understand all the settings as well as he or she should. Smart phones can be lost as easily as a set of car keys, but they contain a whole lot more information that is protected from unauthorized viewing . . .how? If your enterprise wants to employ one or more of these new technologies, particularly if you don't already have your other security holes plugged, you're just going to add to your enterprise's vulnerability (and you thought just implementing them at all would be your problem).

The great news is that you don't have to invent security solutions for the devils you already know. There are System i products that meet all the conventional problems already out there. it's just a matter of finding enough money in the budget for problems this important.

Is it true that storage is like chocolate because you never have enough of either? Perhaps that's why my doctor limits me to 1 KB of disk, but 2008 may be a better year than most for getting more of what we want for places to tuck in our data. IDC , a large IT industry-analysis company, has made some sweet predictions for storage. Aside from a surprisingly small 60 percent growth prediction for storage demand (I for one would have expected it to be more), IDC forecasts the beginning of widespread adoption of online storage services such as online backup, archiving, and replication.

Sending (encrypted!) backups across the Internet does seem like an economical idea, doesn’t it? In addition, IDC thinks the price point for solid-state disks is going to come down enough to make that option attractive, virtual servers are going to get hotter, and more vendors will tempt SMBs with servers with integrated backup software as a one-stop shopping answer to storage. These are the highlights of an IDC paper, "Worldwide Storage 2008 Top 10 Predictions: New Paradigms" (document 209796 on their website), but you’ll have to buy the report to read the rest. However, storage-as-a-service and all-in-one storage servers seem like opportunities to make money in the System i market, and though virtualization is only here for the Windows side of many enterprises, that’s strictly a temporary roadblock.

One final piece of good news for IT people: there’s a new way to laugh at yourself and with those around you, available starting this week. That’s Heroes Happen Here, a daily, web-based comic strip that launched Monday. Designed for IT developers and other professionals, it combines humor and a story line about four software developers who chase down a rogue computer virus while doing their regular jobs and trying to maintain personal lives. Readers can subscribe via an RSS feed to get daily installments, and author Jordan Gorfinkel, a former editor for DC Comics, says he'll follow the Dilbert example and accept ideas for future storylines from his readers. The strip is jointly sponsored by Microsoft and Seagate to “demonstrate their respect and appreciation for the IT community.”

2008 may not be as bad a year as some fear.

Posted by on January 29, 2008 at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2008 1:09 PM

FTP for President!

Probably one of the most popular types of software among end users across all industries is file transfer utilities. Although there are many ways to electronically move files from one computer system to another, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the most common method. Some public figures might envy FTP. Maybe they should.

"In this era of fractured political preferences, at least here in the U.S., perhaps it's time to pay attention to one solution that actually unites this country." This what we might hear if FTP had a press secretary. Fortunately for all of us, in computer rooms across this nation, we instead simply hear the voice of the people (computer operators, mostly) saying, "It's running." Aren't we glad?

This popularity with users remains despite FTP's known security hazards. For example, there's really no control over the use of FTP in many environments, which lets users wittingly, or sometimes accidentally, send confidential information to someone who shouldn't have it. Sometimes the information is going to a proper recipient but it's via unencrypted means that can let other people who shouldn't have that information intercept it. More subtle problems, such as vulnerabilities created by program exit points to call FTP, also exist. As it is with some faults dogging some politicians, however, the end-user electorate largely doesn't seem to care. Style winning over substance? I'll let you decide.

People have made many efforts to address this problem both on and off the System i. Older methods involve such means as controlling System i authorities, encrypting the data being sent, and third-party FTP solutions that offer these or other protections. However, all such solutions require at least two prerequisites on the part of persons in a position of authority in an IT department, namely recognition that FTP security is a problem and the willingness to do something about it. Recognition is usually not the dilemma because FTP problems are getting to be a familiar cautionary tale. Doing something about it requires both the realization that "data theft can happen here" and the determination to install some sort of FTP solution that at least tracks FTP activity, if not actually securing it. Often, the real problem is that any protection scheme might complicate the lives of end users who want to use FTP, and some of those users may considerably outrank the IT person coping with the issue. Such software changes can be unpopular, and therefore it becomes easy to put off "reform efforts" in light of more urgent IT tasks. End users like their FTP too much to take any perceived interference with it lightly.

If you were one of those hoping that the logic of protecting corporate information assets would eventually prevail over end-user ease-of-use preferences, that hope has been dealt a nasty blow by the release of recent results of a Hilty Moore & Associates study of FTP use commissioned by Sterling Commerce. That survey shows that end-user preference for FTP use is at an all-time high (up 64 percent in 2007 over 2006 according to survey respondents) despite the fact that 93 percent of respondents experienced delivery stoppages or incomplete transmission as often as 20 percent of the time. In other words, end users love their FTP more than ever even though it doesn't always work reliably! Security concerns are just an also-ran.

The survey queried end users at more than 100 enterprises in such fields as diverse as financial services, health care, retail, manufacturing, and government. The one piece of good news is that 84 percent of respondents have "the same or an increased level of concern" about FTP security compared to 2006, and 60 percent say they are "in the process of stepping up their encryption efforts" with plans to encrypt 80 percent of their file transfers by the end of 2008. (I've heard of "Just in Time" as a concept in manufacturing, but this apparently doesn't apply to file transfer.)

If you're an IT person without an FTP solution, there are a wide range of products for i5/OS (dare I call it "The FTP Platform" in this context?) that can offer a specific remedy. "In the interest of equal time," I list them here alphabetically by product name for your convenience. Not all of them include built-in security, and some are terminal emulation products with inherent FTP capabilities. I have excluded those requiring the Java Virtual Machine. Vote wisely.

Alliance FTP Manager (Patrick Townsend & Associates),
Blue Zone Secure FTP (Seagull Software),
BOSaNOVA and BOSaNOVA TCP/IP (BOSaNOVA),
BOS Safe-T (Better On-Line Solutions),
ComMa2/400 (Fortech Italia),
Covast ODETTE File Transfer Protocol Adapter for IBM WebSphere (Covast),
CyberFusion Integration Suite (Proginet),
EASYVIEW (Help/Systems),
Envision Universal FTP (Surround Technologies),
ESEND (Help/Systems),
ETU File Transfer Utility (NLynx),
FileSWEEP/Rapid (Core Technology),
FileXfer3X400/370 (Broderick Data Systems),
FTP/400 (RJS Software Systems),
FTP/Client (INPRO International),
HTP-Link iSeries (RTC Group),
HostExplorer (Hummingbird),
OnWeb Web-to-Host (NetManage),
PASSPORT (Zephyr),
REDOC (Redoc),
Reflection for the Multi-Host Enterprise (AttachmateWRQ),
Remote Software Facility (Bug Busters Software Engineering),
RUMBA FTP (NetManage),
Robot/CLIENT (Help/Systems),
SSH Tectia Server (SSH Communications Security),
Surveyor/400 and Transfer Anywhere (Linoma Software),
TinyTERM Plus (Century Software),
truExchange FTP (nuBridges), and
Z/SCOPE (Cybele Software).

Posted by on January 22, 2008 at 1:09 PM | Comments (2)

January 8, 2008 2:52 PM

2007 Showed System i Market is Lively, Part II

In my blog of last week I summarized many of the most significant new products that came onto the System i market in 2007. However, it was a bountiful year for upgrades of existing products as well. Although I can't possibly summarize all of them in a single blog, and certainly can't mention all the changes, there were quite a few worth reviewing.

To show right off the bat why I couldn't possibly mention all the changes, let's start with the most prolific upgrade of the year in terms of new features, which was Oracle Corporation's release of J.D. Edwards World A9.1. The widely used ERP application featured 1,297 enhancements in what Oracle called its "first major upgrade in 10 years," which greatly strengthened the product's ability to support enterprises with global operations. The upgrade also added a major new module to handle service and warranty management, included support for workflow functions, and improved product functions in such widely diverse areas as quality management, manufacturing and distributions operations, financials, inventory management, and human resources. Another ERP vendor, Vormittag Associates International (VAI), brought out S2K 3.7.6, an upgrade of its RPG-based ERP app. VAI's upgrade focused on distribution and warehouse-management functions, such as making the software recommend automatic inventory transfers, improving warehouse cycle-counting features, and offering time-allocation features for shop-floor data collection. Other significant upgrades in applications for distributors and manufacturers included Infor's Infor SRM SupplyWeb 10.0, which added new modules for production invoicing and purchase order collaboration, and CYBRA Corporation's MarkMagic Print Manager, an additional module for its RFID tag and label product, MarkMagic.

Software developers saw numerous improvements to many existing tools for building and webfacing application programs, many having to do with SQL and acknowledging the need for System i programs to exist in mixed environments. Business Computer Design International (BCD) (bcdsoftware.com) unveiled WebSmart ILE 6.6, adding templates that let users build web apps that connect to either MS SQL or MySQL databases residing on Linux or Unix boxes, and introducing both visual and WYSIWYG HTML editors. Mrc beefed up its m-Power with Web 2.0 templates, the ability to incorporate Web 2.0 capabilities into finished applications, Ajax functionality, and a "hover" feature that lets end users view data and drill down into their web-based business application GUIs without clicking. Mrc also added Web 2.0 templates and Ajax functionality to its mrc-Productivity Series product. And in keeping with its commitment to evangelize PHP to the System i world, Zend Corporation upgraded Zend Core twice, adding V5R3 and native DB2/400 support in January and the PHP 5.2.4 stack in November.

Linoma Software released Surveyor/400 3.4 with several SQL-related modifications, including syntax color coding of SQL statements, additional color-coded SQL templates, enhanced wizards for building SQL statements more quickly, and an audit log that tracks SQL statements executed by individual end users. HiT Software upgraded its middleware bridge, Ritmo/i5 4.0, to help users develop forms and generate reports that include DB2 information and use wizards to import DB2 data into SQL server. Looksoftware upgraded its entire app modernization suite (newlook, centric, and soarchitect) to V8.1 by adding support for MS Outlook and Google Gadgets to developers can incorporate objects and capabilities from those apps into applications being converted from green-screen to graphical mode, for example, being able to use Outlook to drive workflow features. LANSA updated its RAMP from LANSA to let developers open and control multiple application-framework windows at the same time and replace 5250 screens with screen wrappers.

Application development means more than code-writing tools, of course. Aldon improved its Application Lifecycle Management solution with parallel development functions, an enhanced graphical compare and merge utility, a tighter link to the company's Community Manager product to enable realtime incident management and project progress-report views, and an identity access-management feature that enables user authentication, role-based access-management control and auditing, and online policy management. Another software configuration-management vendor, MKS, released MKS Integrity 2007, an upgrade that supported requirements change management, enforced process control, unified test management, IT service management, and change management for SAP and Oracle/Peoplesoft application mods. The Original Software Group bolstered its TestDrive-Assist application-testing system to add a markup function that records and creates an annotated list of comments and corrected actions for programs under test.

System managers and operators will benefit from the changes some of the system-management and system operations-automation vendors made to their products. Help/Systems enhanced several products in its Robot line, for example. Robot/SCHEDULE 10.0 added a Java GUI that let users control System i job-scheduling tasks from a PC, a Schedule Activity Monitor that displays all system job-schedule activity, and an Explorer feature that lets users manage all job scheduling from a single window. Robot/NETWORK 10.0 also added a GUI, as well as wizards that help users connect to hosts and apply product updates and license codes, and works with i5/OS to provide enhanced security to internal objects. Robot/LPAR 2.0 integrated that product with the System I Hardware Management Console, added green-screen and command-line interfaces that let users set a partition’s base levels for memory and processor resources, and enabled movement of I/O devices (e.g., tape and optical drives) between partitions. Finally, Help/Systems offered EASY VIEW 8.0, an upgrade of its database file-display solution, which enables file exports to the IFS in a column-delimited format and provides other options for file and record viewing and transfer.

High-availability (HA) fans got some good news too. Vision Solutions' MIMIX 5.0 debuted AutoGuard (an auditing module with large-object support), MIMIX cluster1 (a cluster-management solution), a self-installation procedure, and application-detection features. Vision's Vision Director 7.0 added the ability to monitor objects dynamically and keep cross-reference info current, lets users group libraries into multiple domains and monitor growth across those domains, and included a change-analysis feature that shows system changes at domain, library, object, and profile levels. Finally, the company's iTera HA 5.0 introduced autonomic HA features, role-swap testing and monitoring, and extended product security features. Also incorporating new autonomics capabilities was Maximum Availability's *noMAX, as well as a green-screen menu option, a patrolMAX module that handles replication of out-of-synch objects, and the ability to control the product via property settings.

BugBusters Software Engineering's Remote Software Facility (RSF), long known as a utility for managing and transferring objects between systems, grew into a new product area by adding HA capabilities in RSF 8.1. These let users transfer user profiles, system values, network attributes, authorization lists, data queues, and other system entities in addition to data and program objects. 8.1 also introduced a Work with Sync Attributes command to enable synchronization from a central console. Earlier in the year, RSF 8.0 also added the abilities to exchange the entire contents of one System i to another without using a tape drive, retrieve SAVE files from a remote system without saving them as objects first, and exchange libraries and other objects between systems without prior configuration or setup. And speaking of moving objects, Linoma Software's Transfer Anywhere 1.9 incorporated PGP encryption to its file-transfer features, as well as enabling automatic detection of business partners' preferred encryption and file-compression methods simply by analyzing incoming transfers.

Rounding out the system management upgrades, Centerfield Technology, an early adopter of autonomics in its products, released HomeRun 6.0 with the ability to integrate with IBM's Visual Explain, improvements to its DDS logical-file and SQL-index optimization, and the capability of monitoring just active jobs on a system. Midrange Performance Group upgraded its Performance Navigator twice in 2007, once to provide a graphical PC tool for capacity planning and modeling of AIX and Linux workloads on System i, and a second time to introduce a management reporting suite that captures graphs and tables of key System i performance metrics in a single HTML output, as well as to include WebSphere-specific performance graphing.

The hot area of security and compliance products saw some significant changes also. The PowerTech Group boosted Compliance Monitor 2.0 with an aggregation feature that compresses system log data so more of it can be kept online with less overhead, a GUI that gathers and displays log data from multiple sources, and a log-interpretation function that translates audit-journal entries into messages users can map to COBIT, PCI, and other regulatory frameworks. The company's AuthorityBroker 3.1, its user-profile control solution, lets users integrate their own programs with it, change library lists or accounting codes of user profiles after a swap takes place, require manager approval for a swap to continue, and view lists of currently swapped users. SkyView Partners' Policy Minder for i5/OS and OS/400 1.3 altered the product by letting it act on inactive profiles, report on and automatically fix many system values, and by including an enhanced authorization list that enables integration of Policy Minder with existing apps. Raz-Lee Security upgraded its iSecurity suite to include a Java GUI, a 5250 emulator, a user-authentication feature that lets end users manage their own passwords, and the ability to execute reports for groups of servers. Valid Technologies augmented its Valid Secure System Authentication (VSSA) suite with Managed Domain Signon for Windows and Password Automation Service, which respectively lets users access Windows Active Directory credentials for logging onto System i, and combine VSSA biometrics with passwords (or dispense with passwords completely) for user authentication. Late in the year, VSSA 2.3 enabled its implementation on a transaction level, rolled out an application-enablement toolkit with integration modules for ILE languages, and a port mapping feature that lets users open multiple desktop protocol sessions across multiple server platforms.

A final product area worth a separate look is content management, which includes both document-management and database-manipulation solutions. Quadrant Software upgraded IntelliChief, its paperless process-management solution twice. IntelliChief 1.1 let users track content from one document back through all documents from which it came, group captured documents into a single packet, and access a complete history of the stages of any document over time. IntelliChief 2.0 made its capabilities configurable as web services, let its dynamic workflow-processing feature function more like a high0level programming language, and introduced a detailed audit log for all documents, including those handled by other Quadrant products. Quadrant also upgraded its FastFax product suite to version 4.7.3 to incorporate auditing for all jobs and documents, a recovery function for the solution's utility and imager programs, and support for batch e-mail messaging. ACOM Solutions also enrolled its EZContentManager (EZCM) in the double-upgrade club for 2007. EZCM 3.1.1 brought AES-256 file encryption into the product with a Windows-like GUI and support for Java 6.0, Tomcat 5.5, and the Firefox browser. EZCM 3.3 improved the product's ability to perform operations on multiple documents concurrently and create processes in one folder for later use in other folders. Inventive Designers made its DTM 3.0 able to generate documents in more than 15 output-file formats and integrated the product with MS Word 2007. Brooks Internet Software's ExcelliPrint 3.2 gained a facility for transforming IPDS documents into PDF and TIF formats and added a browser interface for managing System i IPDS devices and spooled files. S4i Systems' latest version of S4i Express paved the way for an upcoming browser-based retrieval system for the product, let users assign distribution priority levels to documents, and offered support for conducting product operations on binary files. Halcyon Software produced Spool File Manager 5.0, which grafts onto the utility realtime spooled-file monitoring and filtering, the ability to override spooled-file attributes without programming, and the ability to e-mail spooled files natively from the System i as PDF, text, or HTML documents. Symtrax's Compleo Suite 4 was boosted with the ability to manage and distribute System i spooled files and output from major ERP apps (e.g., SAP, JDE, MAPICS), a GUI that lets users access spooled and ERP output, and a function that lets users insert information into documents residing in a database file without affecting spooled or output files.

On the database side, PlanetJ Corporation's Web Object Wizard (WOW) folded in some significant flexibility with regard to databases, even though it also functions as a web-application builder. WOW 6.5 lets users assign authorities to specific database fields within applications, automatically populate database records and increment field values, and merge data into prebuilt MS Excel spreadsheets. WOWFusion Charts, a later add-on, lets users provide business information from databases in a graphical format, search for data on multiple systems, and use the product's GUI to build web applications and charts against any JDBC-compliant database. HiT Software also released Allora 5.0, its bidirectional data-transformation tool for XML and any database, to include a workflow manager, a graphical layout environment for creating, scheduling, and executing RDB-to-XML transformation and file-management tasks. Finally, and hardly least as the bearer of the highest rev level of any product upgrade this year, Applied Logic Corporation's venerable database editor, File Edit Utility 15.0, gained the ability to encrypt and decrypt database data, manage and maintain audit logs, edit stream files, and let users reclaim deleted record space in multiple files.

Many of these enhancements may seem minor to the general reader. But they're really not, particularly when taken in the context of their own product types. Some of them add quite significant capabilities to their products and make them even more valuable to the enterprises that buy and use them. Depending on each user-enterprise's needs, all provide abilities that can be worth far more than their license costs. More specifically, the rich proliferation of new product facilities in 2007 illustrates the dynamism that the System i market continues to show in the quality and breadth of the products available for it.

Posted by on January 8, 2008 at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

2007 Showed System i Market is Lively, Part I

As we head into 2008, we can definitely say that the year we're leaving behind showed plenty of future promise for the System i market, particularly in regards to the new products that became available. Here's a quick recap of some of the most interesting and useful brand-new products that debuted in 2007. We'll review some of the more significant product upgrades here next week.

Zend Corporation's PHP was one of the big stories of the year as that language made a place for itself in System i developers' workbenches. Business Computer Design International (BCD) took the lead among development-tool companies in providing a means for easy entry to the PHP world with WebSmart PHP. This product runs on top of Zend Core and offers many features that simplify web application development for the System i using PHP. As you'd expect from any development tool, there are design and coding tools for Visual HTML and PHP, more than 50 intelligent templates for accessing databases, wizards and code snippets, built-in prompts, and source-code coloring options. Possibly most useful for beginners was WebSmart PHP's context-sensitive help with direct links to assistance on Zend's website and embedded documentation for more than 5,000 PHP functions.

BCD wasn't the only company to produce a PHP workbench, however, as System Objects presented Delphi/400 for PHP the following month. This PHP IDE runs on Linux, Unix, and Windows partitions as well as i5/OS to support web app development. Delphi/400 for PHP includes HTML page templates, visual components for building multitab input forms, and, like WebSmart PHP, can access both DB2 and MySQL databases.

Of course, PHP isn't the only option for web development, just the newest. Profound Logic Software launched Genie, a webfacing tool that generates graphical versions of legacy apps built in RPG, Cobol, and CL for web use among other options. Genie works on the fly, can convert apps on its own but enables customization, and lets developers pick and choose between application screens to be converted or customized. Another useful Genie feature is that it lets developers choose between using client-side Java scripts or a server-side automation language for navigating through applications. For those still committed to CGI for web development, CoralTree Systems offered The Renaissance Framework, an open-source workbench for building and deploying secure CGI-based web apps under V5R3 or higher. Framework combines elements of JavaScript, HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and ILE RPG to produce a tool with a browser interface that generates apps using the Model-View-Controller architecture.

If someone were giving a prize for most new products launched in a year, our busy friends at NewGeneration Software (NGS) would win it hands down. Throughout the second half of year the company launched various parts of its Decision Assist business-intelligence suite. These consist of Financial Performance, a financial-analytics app; Business Performance, a business-analytics solution; and Healthcare, a BI product for hospitals and other medical facilities. All three include a built-in web portal and executive dashboards, multidimensional modeling, and direct output to MS Excel, and use a System i-resident DB2 datamart. As if that weren't enough, NGS also produced IQ Client, a query development module for its entire family of BI products, and a Query/400 API for its NGS-IQ product line. Hey guys, it's okay to take a day off once in a while!

Security was probably the hottest area for new applications in 2007. Help/Systems, after some long and careful development, authored Robot/SECURITY, a watchdog component for its Robot automated operations suite. Four of the product's five modules monitor exit points, conduct security audits, keep an eye on journal events, and enable PC-based forensic analysis. The fifth lets system managers adopt a new tactic for giving users who need one or two special privileges once in a while by automating temporary swaps with special user profiles that have special authorities, but only on an as-needed basis.

Data-specific security got a boost from three vendors. Linoma Software's Crypto Complete lets enterprises implement database-field encryption with up to 256-bit encryption keys without requiring application-code field expansion and includes a key-management feature. Applied Logic Corporation's Pro/Encrypt similarly offers data encryption with up to 256-bit keys for databases, files and files groups, and whole libraries. On the auditing side, Kisco Information Systems unveiled iFileAudit, which uses file-audit journals to keep track of changes (and who or what made them) to fields and files in native databases.

P.A. Townsend & Associates made an announcement that was key in a literal sense. It cooperated with NCipher to port that company's keyAuthority product to the System i, an application that lets users generate and manage encryption keys for a wide variety of functions. Townsend also launched Alliance LogAgent for the System i, a security compliance solution for mixed-platform environments that extracrts security information from a variety of locations, formats them to meet the Syslog events open standard, then transmits them to a multiplatform system-log server application. NuBridges LLC provided Secure Transaction Manager, which lets business partners exchange high volumes of files via any protocol in a secured environment.

Hand-in-glove with security is user authentication, and System i users got some new options in this area in 2007. I/O Concepts rolled out SecurITe, a standalone user-authentication server that's System i-compatible but controls system access for multiple platforms. The PowerTech Group offered up Password Control, an application that enforces strong password policies on System i servers and that includes a dictionary of first names, terms from pop culture, and other weak passwords it won't allow users to enter.

Rounding out the most utilitarian of the 2007 security products are two from BOSaNOVA that focus on the problem of unencrypted backup tapes. The Q3 Storage Security Encryption Appliance attaches to System i tape drive ports and encrypts all data written to tape. The Q3i is a secure tape drive with this function built in for tape drives using Linear Tape Open 1, 2, or 3 capabilities.

Four products don't quite fit in any of the areas I've already covered, but I want to be sure to mention them. Advanced BusinessLink's Strategi mobileACCESS, technically released late in 2006, is helpful as a 5250 emulation solution for mobile communications devices and optimized for large-scale applications. Teamstudio's Usage Monitor, although it only works for systems using Lotus Domino, tracks usage metrics for all of an enterprise's applications. Shield Advanced Solutions introduced Receiver Apply Program/400, a journal receiver-based disaster-recovery solution for System i environments using LPARs. Profound Logic Software, already mentioned, released iData, a browser-based database access and editing tool.

I'll conclude with a summary of some of the most feature-laden general software applications released in 2007. SugarCRM ported Sugar Enterprise, a customer-relationship management application that can use MySQL databases and Zend's PHP on the System i and that also lets users customize their customer-facing business processes. EXTOL rolled out the EXTOL EDI Appliance, which is based on the System i Express model 515 and provides all software applications and connections needed for secure participation in electronic data interchange via legacy applications that aren't already EDI-enabled. Infor Global Solutions delivered Infor ERP XA MES Suite, a manufacturing execution system for the System i that integrates ERP, MRP, and shop-floor control activities. Lawson Software initiated Lawson QuickStep for Distribution, a preconfigured ERP app for distribution companies on the System i and other platforms. CYBRA Corporation added EdgeMagic to its product line, an integrated radio frequency identification (RFID) application that integrates with ERP and warehouse-management apps and manages edge devices and RFID readers. EMC's Documentum Process Suite is a business process-management application with server-side components that run on the System i. LANSA made available LANSA Composer, a business-process integration application for System i machines running the Java Virtual Machine.

The System i market will remain strong and vibrant as long as vendors are out there providing products such as these that solve business problems and save users time and effort.

Posted by on January 8, 2008 at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)