System iNetwork

January 8, 2008

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 at January 8, 2008 2:52 PM