IBM introduces new software to accelerate workload movement to System z

November 23, 2009 · Filed Under Business Software, Productivity Software, Software News · Comment 

IBM announced 10 new software products to help companies lower application management costs by optimizing the System z mainframe for more workloads, such as data analytics, collaborative application development, application maintenance and other key business processes.

Given System z‘s ability to reduce costs through server consolidation, IBM and the industry have aggressively extended the breadth of new workloads for the mainframe via 3,800 z/OS-based and 3,000 Linux-based applications. The unique ability of the mainframe to host many application services on one system has helped System z achieve one of the industry’s lowest application costs per user. Minimal application costs are important for companies which rely on multiple applications to run their business.

The new products span IBM’s software portfolio to provide a range of benefits for System z customers. The benefits include optimal application connectivity, productivity, security and data management.

The new offerings complement IBM’s recent announcement of seven integrated hardware, software and services packages — IBM System z Solution Editions — to help customers deploy new enterprise workloads, such as data warehousing, electronic payments and disaster recovery.

The new products include:
– IMS 11 provides direct SQL access to IMS data from any distributed platform. This simplifies and speeds the process of connecting applications and data, while also enabling easier data replication and change capture processes. Enhanced Java support expands the number of developers available to support IMS applications and business services.

– New products from WebSphere to enhance business process management, connectivity and integration including: WebSphere Process Server for z/OS V7, IBM WebSphere ILOG Business Rule Management Systems, WebSphere MQ for z/OS V7.0.1, WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS V7.0, and IBM Problem Determination Tools V10. These products are designed to help clients discover insights that enable innovation, maximize the value of business interactions, and optimize productivity and resources. For a full list and description of the new WebSphere products visit: www.ibm.com/smartwork/businessagility

To help clients cut application maintenance costs, IBM offers:
– IBM Rational Developer for System z version 7.6 provides a modern GUI development environment, to increase developer productivity and lower the costs associated with maintaining and building multi-platform applications. The new offering helps attract next-generation workers, consolidates multi-language development into a single environment and dramatically reduces CPU usage of up to 50 percent, minimizing budget
expenditures.
– IBM Rational Team Concert for System z version 2.0 uses a new common repository to help teams to work together, share assets, automate processes and deliver software faster. The software expedites response times and cuts costs by consolidating disparate development team infrastructures and automating software development across multiple platforms, which is important for tiered applications.

– An enhanced set of IBM Rational Compilers for C/C++, COBOL and PL/I reduce application MIP requirements, while increasing developer productivity and reducing both capital expense and overall development costs.

To help clients gain better insights about enterprise assets and lower network management costs, IBM offers:

– Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS removes unused and obsolete software and helps determine software usage to plan effectively for the future and to run smarter systems.
– IBM Tivoli NetView for z/OS 5.4 improves network and automation control for data centers and change management. It provides an understanding of how network availability and events impact the business, helping customers deliver smarter, more automated systems.
– IBM Tivoli zSecure provides a mainframe security solution for automated analysis and reporting of mainframe events and compliance dashboards that lower auditing costs helping companies run a smarter more cost effective system.

Telcordia, Sodifrance and HVB Unicredit are among the companies worldwide already benefiting from the long-term economics of the System z platform.

“Telcordia’s data systems are designed to provide consistently high throughput all the time. Each system averages five million transactions per day, supporting an average of 250 gigabytes of active data,” said Paul Gandolfo, a senior technical specialist in application development and performance at Telcordia. “Our customers bet their businesses on the services we provide, and we bet our service performance and reliability on IBM’s Information Management System. Downtime is not an option.”

“Building an agile development team requires a multiplatform approach and Sodifrance uses Rational Developer for System z and Rational Team Concert for System z to help application teams synchronize their efforts and improve collaboration,” said Hugh Smith, project manager of Sodifrance. “Rational on System z offers a powerful and valuable combination for any company that wants to boost its development team’s productivity.”

“Programmers that are using Rational Developer for System z have found that development is more comfortable than with our existing set of development tools,” says Almut Geiger of HVB Unicredit. “Debugging in particular is much faster. Features like syntax checking, content assist, multiple views and error identification make development easier. For example, when there were coding errors before, a developer had to find the correct line number in the code and then try to determine what was wrong with the code. Now they just click on an icon, and they are led directly to the position of the error. It takes people some time to get familiar with a new environment, but when they become familiar with Rational Developer for System z, we are seeing an estimated 15 percent increase in development efficiency and a 10 percent increase in testing efficiency.”

System z, visit http://www.ibm.com/mainframe

System z software, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/os/systemz

Source: IBM

Tags: , , , , ,

Teradata Enterprise Analytics Cloud extends architectural flexibility and business agility

October 19, 2009 · Filed Under Business Software, Internet Software, Productivity Software, Software News · Comment 

First public and private Cloud Computing offer for rapid analytics

Teradata Corporation, the world’s largest company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, announced that the Teradata Enterprise Analytics Cloud(TM) provides Teradata customers architectural flexibility, which enables them to meet their expanding analytic needs by leveraging cloud computing technologies. Initial offerings include the Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud, Teradata Express on Amazon EC2, and Teradata Express for VMware Player.

For the business user, public and private clouds provide flexible, self service for the rapid building of short term analytic data marts, allowing users to pay only for the computing power actually used. More importantly, these cloud solutions offer business users and developers another means of improving decision making with agility and speed.

Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud

The Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud, Teradata’s entry into private Cloud Computing, is a unique set of products, capabilities and services designed to enable agile analytics in a Teradata private cloud environment. This allows for rapid development and sandbox-style analytics. Business users can create data marts inside their Teradata system within minutes. This eliminates the need to build separate, costly physical data marts, because the production data can be accessed directly, without data movement or duplication. Built on the proven Teradata Database and platforms, the Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud combines advanced workload management, the new Teradata Elastic Mart Builder tool, and a services methodology to enable business users to rapidly exploit data marts inside their Teradata System. The Teradata Elastic Mart Builder is a Teradata Viewpoint self-service portlet that makes it easy to create data marts for application development. It is flexible and allows external data to be combined with existing data facilitating the discovery of new insights. The Teradata Elastic Mart Builder is being released as a free tool to be deployed through Teradata Developer Exchange. Teradata Active System Management, the company’s flagship workload management product, is a key enabler because it optimizes priorities between experimental analytics and production workloads.

The Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud allows the business user to rapidly analyze data and respond to market opportunities with speed and confidence. This solution helps chief information officers control data mart proliferation, reduce costs for software licenses and servers, and lower training and labor costs.

“Many IT organizations are under-resourced and under tremendous pressure to cut costs, driving some business users to create their own ‘shadow IT’ organizations to meet their needs,” said Scott Gnau, chief developer officer, Teradata Corporation. “These shadow IT groups create conflict between the business users and IT groups. The Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud helps to eliminate the conflicts and brings business and IT together, saving money and enriching their analytical insights.”

Teradata Express Cloud Offerings

The two new Teradata Express cloud offerings are built on Teradata Express, which is a free, non-production version of Teradata Database software intended for developers and evaluation scenarios. The cloud versions of Teradata Express support up to one terabyte of data and are powered by Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

Teradata Express on Amazon EC2

Teradata Express on Amazon EC2 is available on the flexible Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This prepackaged edition is a free developer version of the Teradata Database for use in the scalable, robust Amazon EC2 environment. Customers can quickly launch Teradata Express on Amazon EC2 and begin their collaborative work from any location in the world. Customers benefit from the easy self-service, flexible configurations, and the cost effective Amazon Web Services infrastructure, resulting in faster time to value and the quicker completion of projects.

Teradata Express for VMware Player

Teradata Express for VMware Player delivers a fully configured Teradata Database bundled for private cloud analytics. Once VMware software is installed, the Teradata Database can be loaded in minutes, taking advantage of the many features of VMware. For the Teradata Database, VMware is an important stepping stone towards delivering internal private clouds for developers and information technology operations managers. The value for customers will be the easy creation of Teradata test and development environments with a significant reduction in capital costs from server consolidation.

According to Gnau, “Teradata is all about choice that no other vendor can offer. Teradata’s advocated architecture is an integrated data warehouse, but we offer the flexibility for customers to leverage the power of Teradata in any architecture they chose to meet their business need. Our entry into loud Cloud Computing is one alternative and an extension to our Platform Family, which positions ‘Teradata for all your analytical needs.’”

Teradata is the only vendor to offer a broad family of platforms with price and performance that spans the unique business and analytical data warehouse needs of companies, making Teradata suitable to be everywhere in the enterprise. The family is supported by the high performance and dependable Teradata 13 Database, the most significant and technically advanced database for analytics.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Printing with Windows Small Business Server 2008

October 16, 2009 · Filed Under Productivity Software, Software News · Comment 

ThinPrint simplifies Remote Web Workplace printing

Print-optimization specialist ThinPrint is now offering new product versions for the Windows Small Business Server. The .print RDP Engine for Remote Web Workplace 7.6 and .print for Remote Web Workplace 7.6 optimize printing for users who use the Remote Web Workplace to access a remote terminal server or desktop via a web browser.

The Windows Small Business Server tends to be utilized by small and mid-sized companies with up to 75 workstations or users. Remote Web Workplace, a feature of the Small Business Server, allows smaller branch offices, mobile employees and home workstations to access a terminal server or a remote desktop via a secure web session (https).

The .print RDP Engine for Remote Web Workplace provides locally available printers when a user accesses the terminal server with Remote Web Workplace, while the .print for Remote Web Workplace solution provides this when a user connects to a desktop with Remote Web Workplace. Access to the Remote Web Workplace printing functions becomes quick and easy in each case. In addition, the print data transferred by both .print solutions is highly compressed, meaning that it reaches the printer rapidly while conserving bandwidth.

Thanks to ThinPrint’s DRIVER FREE PRINTING technology, no printer drivers have to be installed on the company’s Small Business Server, the terminal server or desktop. All locally available printers can automatically be accessed by users via the internet. Both SBS printing solutions feature plug and play installation.

Available as 32-bit or 64-bit versions, both are already compatible with Windows 7 and support Windows Small Business Server 2003, as well as 2008.

The .print Engine for Remote Web Workplace, which facilitates access to remote desktops and enables Remote Web Workplace printing, is now available for 69 USD from the manufacturer’s online shop at http://www.thinprint.com/shop. The software can also be purchased from any of ThinPrint’s 500 partners worldwide.

Free 30-day demo versions of Remote Web Workplace printing, Remote printing, SBC printing, RDP printing and Virtual printing can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website at http://www.thinprint.com/demo.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

WinZip 14 takes advantage of Windows 7 innovations

October 15, 2009 · Filed Under Productivity Software, Software News, Utilities and Operating Systems · Comment 

New WinZip 14 offers many usability enhancements, improved security, and a new Backup Edition

WinZip 14 takes full advantage of the new capabilities in Windows(R) 7, streamlining the zipping and unzipping processes and affirming WinZip’s position at the vanguard of file compression, encryption, packaging and data backup software. In addition to the Standard edition and the full-featured Pro edition, WinZip 14 is now also available in the new Backup edition.

WinZip 14 saves time and space, making it easy to zip and unzip files for quick, efficient, and secure file transfer, email transmission, and data storage. It is the data compression choice for millions of users, including thousands of organizations, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. More than 190 million users have downloaded copies of WinZip from CNET’s download.com alone.

WinZip 14 Incorporates Windows 7 Enhancements

Windows 7 includes many significant enhancements that simplify working with documents, folders, and programs. WinZip 14 takes advantage of these new features to make working with Zip files easier than ever:

Libraries: WinZip 14 provides support for Windows 7 libraries. Libraries group together folders with a common theme; for example, the Pictures library puts all of your folders that contain pictures in one convenient place. With WinZip 14 you can simply select the Pictures library and zip all of your pictures, no matter where they are. And with the advanced JPEG compression supported in the Zipx format you can compress these pictures 20-25% without any loss of quality or data integrity. Backing up your important data is a breeze using libraries via the WinZip Job Wizard.

Jump Lists: WinZip 14 also supports the new Jump Lists. Simply pin the WinZip icon to your taskbar for quick and easy access to frequently used zip features, as well as to recently used Zip files and WinZip jobs.

Windows Touch: If you have a touch screen computer you will love WinZip’s full support for gestures — simple finger movements — on your touch screen PC. Using gestures, you can easily scroll through the contents of your Zip files. You can even pan, zoom, and rotate your images in WinZip Pro’s built-in Image Viewer without touching your keyboard or mouse!

Other interface enhancements include improved Dialogs in the Windows 7 style and new filtering and organizational enhancements for finding files and archives.

Improved Security

A key reason why many users purchase WinZip is its strong, easy-to-use AES encryption. WinZip 14 introduces automatic wiping of temporary copies of encrypted files after viewing, using the U.S. Department of Defense standard (DoD 5220.22-M). In addition, WinZip 14 recognizes Intel-based computers with built-in AES encryption and uses the available hardware support to make encryption operations two to three times faster.

WinZip 14 Backup edition

For the first time WinZip 14 is also available in a Backup edition. With its powerful Job Wizard users can automatically backup important data files and upload data backups to an off-site server using the internal FTP client, or burn backups to CD or DVD. An automated email notification can be sent upon job completion.

Availability

WinZip 14 is available now. Pricing starts at $29.95 (USD) for WinZip 14 Standard edition, $39.95 (USD) for Backup edition and $49.95 (USD) for Pro edition. Attractive volume licensing discounts are available. Existing registered users can upgrade to WinZip 14 at 50% of the new license fee.

Download links and ordering information can be found on the WinZip web site at http://www.winzip.com.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

CA Internet Security rolls out More Security. Less Cost. Completely Installed. program for the channel

September 5, 2009 · Filed Under Business Software, Networking Software, Security Software, Software News · Comment 

Free CA HIPS with the Purchase or Renewal of CA Threat Manager; All B2B Internet Security Products Now Come with Free Remote Installation

CA, Inc.  announced that its Internet Security Business Unit (ISBU) is rolling out a new channel program for its Business-to-Business (B2B) product lineup. CA will now offer CA Host-Based Intrusion Prevention (HIPS) free with the purchase or renewal of CA Threat Manager (a value of $1800 for 50 licenses). Additionally, all CA B2B Internet Security products, including CA Threat Manager, CA HIPS, CA Total Defense, CA Anti-Virus, CA Anti-Spyware, and CA Gateway Security, will now include remote installation free of charge.

“In this economy everyone is being forced to do more with less,” said Chris Hickey, vice president of Sales and Marketing for CA’s ISBU. “While the economy was in decline, the rate of malware increased exponentially. We created this channel-only program to provide our partners and their customers with the best B2B anti-malware solutions at a great value. By receiving free remote installation and configuration with our products, customers can alleviate the added drain on their already tapped IT resources, and can be assured that the product is installed correctly — helping avoid any potential downtime.”

CA’s full range of B2B Internet Security products facilitate security compliance and safeguard businesses from the most severe online security risks from the network to the desktop. These products include:

– CA Threat Manager is an integrated, cohesive and comprehensive security solution that detects, blocks, cleans and removes a wide range of security threats and covers all IT environments (desktop, laptop, server and other network access points) via a streamlined management capability.
– CA Host-Based Intrusion Prevention (HIPS) combines endpoint Firewall, Intrusion Detection, Intrusion Prevention, Operating System Security and Application Control capabilities to provide centralized proactive threat protection to counter online threats.
– CA Gateway Security is a comprehensive gateway security solution that secures, monitors, filters and blocks potential threats from messaging and Web traffic — all from a centralized console. CA Gateway Security can also protect against the outbound transmission of confidential information, facilitate compliance, improve employee productivity and optimize the use of valuable IT resources — improving overall business continuity.
– CA Total Defense combines these three products into a single offering, providing a multilayered protection solution that minimizes risk and confidentiality breaches, increase system uptime and improves productivity.

CA Remote Deployment Services

A professional CA remote deployment services team is assigned to each project to manage the full installation to help ensure that the job is done quickly and accurately. The installation of CA B2B products, as well as the removal of competitive products, is performed remotely via a broadband connection — providing a convenient way to help ensure that products are installed and configured correctly.

Benefits:
– Free up IT resources for other critical projects
– Reduces the hassle of product installation
– Site survey reduces install surprises
– Convenient scheduling

This offer is available worldwide via CA Internet Security Business Unit partners in English only.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Next Page »