Powering System i

Revolutionize the way users work with software and each other.

Dana Rottman — 2012-01-24T09:48:50-05:00

Using Infor Workspace to create an automatic, customized collaboration process that supports effective and efficient decision-making across the enterprise.

by Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president, Global Product Development, Infor

Many companies have mastered the mechanical aspects of enterprise applications — deployment, procurement, data collection, etc. But even when they manage to gather the right information, most still lack the ability to leverage information in the right way.

It’s no secret: In manufacturing firms everywhere, waves of information swamp productivity efforts. Some employees desperately create their own, undocumented methods to filter the rushing flow of data, while others dive into unconnected pools of data, searching for insight before giving up, exhausted and demoralized. The end result is that every day, every employee is making crucial decisions based on incomplete information — or none at all.

The truth is that gathering information doesn’t make a company more competitive, but effectively using the right information does. It matters less how much inventory is in the pipeline than whether or not that inventory is in the right part of the pipeline to fulfill the right need. Likewise, what happened yesterday may or may not be meaningful today, but what’s happening right now always matters.

In his book The Velocity Manifesto, author Scott Klososky challenges corporate leaders to take a hard look at the “digital plumbing” within their organizations and take responsibility for making sure the right information is being efficiently pushed to the right users for immediate and effective decision-making. As the velocity of business continues to accelerate, this ability will separate leaders from laggards.

“If you want to be a high-velocity leader, you must understand what it takes to have the very best visibility into what your organization is doing and what the performance trends are — in real time… You simply cannot confidently keep pace unless you can clearly see the current status of the machine.”[1]

The complexity of manufacturing in a global marketplace requires multiple real-time views into the state of the “machine.” Customers want faster delivery, higher quality, and more flexible responses. Suppliers meet or don’t meet these demands based on hundreds or even thousands of small decisions made by multiple employees each day. The quality of the cumulative outcome rests on the quality of the information employees can use to make these decisions. Your company might be collecting stockpiles of potentially actionable information, but what good is it if only a handful of people use it strategically?

Infor Workspace addresses this imperative by providing a powerful and consistent information-access interface that’s also easy to use, helping users to become more productive based on context of usage. With Infor Workspace, enterprise applications can coexist with outside information, such as KPIs, dynamic alerts, and other tools that target key functions within the application. Two examples of these tools:

Mapping for visibility into locations of goods, inventories, assets and supply-chain networks.
Currency and time conversion to “normalize” the interactions of globally dispersed teams.

These tools also are context-aware, and automatically anticipate and adapt to user needs and interests based on the user’s role and the business function he’s performing at a given moment. The result is proactive decision-making based on the highest-quality information available to that user at that time. Instead of a user searching for confirmation that a delivery was made, for instance, the interface sends an alert of delivery status. Without the alert a user might find information confirming delivery, but it would depend on whether information was recorded, where the information was recorded, and the user’s ability to locate the information.

Infor Workspace’s “context-awareness” takes the variability out of these handoffs, turning them into an automatic, customized collaboration process that supports effective and efficient decision-making across the enterprise.

While there have been consistent interface advancements since business applications were first introduced, Infor Workspace is a completely new approach. It’s a step-function advancement, designed to revolutionize the way users work with software and each other. No longer will business and social tools be separate. Infor Workspace seamlessly melds them together, making it as easy to interact with coworkers around the world as it is to use the application itself.

[1] Klososky, Scott, The Velocity Manifesto, Greenleaf Book Group Press, Austin, Texas, 2011.

Quality Service: Standardization, Accessibility, and Monitoring Are Key

Valerie Hayden — 2011-11-16T14:00:09-05:00

Manufacturers have made huge strides internally in customer-focused quality improvement through process control. Advances in monitoring technologies allow manufacturers to now anticipate and prevent potentially costly product failures before they erode output and profitability. Yet most manufacturing companies have yet to apply the same innovations externally to their service and maintenance offerings—despite the fact that these programs offer significant opportunities to diversify revenues and increase profits while building customer loyalty. In fact, “process control” can actually be more important for services than for products, since service activity usually takes place offsite—where problems are harder to see and fix, and where response times are longer.

Executives who want to improve process control for their service and maintenance programs focus on three key initiatives:

Establish universal standards for service delivery.
Develop real-time access to full customer records.
Institute rigorous monitoring capabilities across all service processes.

Spare parts replacement is a good example. From a customer’s point of view, a 100% quality experience is having machine part availability in real time—either for a scheduled replacement or when an existing part suddenly fails. Anything short of a seamless process for replacement will hurt the customer’s bottom line—and leave a bad taste in his mouth. At the same time, in most industries the customer’s perspective will be that 100% quality for spare parts replacement isn’t “extra,” but “expected;” yet for most manufacturers this “expected” capability requires synchronization of multiple processes across multiple departments, enabled through real-time access to information at the customer’s site.

How do you put this process control in place? With a fully integrated and automated field-service management solution such as Infor’s Service Management for System i. Service Management helps improve service visibility while empowering service organizations to proactively manage aftermarket services in the field by preventing bottlenecks and missed connections at headquarters.

Take the spare parts example: What if a service technician could access and monitor customer service contracts in real time, and create recurring workflows that prompt actions to supply adequate spare parts for scheduled replacements or parts failures? With automation, the end-to-end parts-replacement process (verification of availability, confirmation of delivery date and shipment location, invoicing, etc.) can be standardized—and communicated to internal staff and customers alike—making parts inventories and service calls more predictable and more profitable. Unfortunately, most organizations still manage service operations with a flurry of phone calls, faxes, emails, and voicemails among technicians and internal contacts—a so-called “process” that’s inherently unstable, unpredictable, inconsistent, and rife with error.

Infor’s Service Management for System i supports the creation of predictable, repeatable standards by enabling best practices and workflows to be embedded into the system and improving customer record accessibility. And with role-based workbenches, front-line employees have direct access to customer records and service activity, allowing them to quickly spot and respond to customer needs and emerging issues. Service Management also includes comprehensive mobile-device support, and can be delivered through a cloud platform. This can reduce wasteful back-and-forth among office employees and field teams, creating a more efficient, effective service model. It also helps create a uniform path for recording customer interaction, initiating root-cause problem solving, and measuring performance and accountability.

With service standards established and customer records available to all staff in real time, service monitoring can occur at multiple organizational levels via various tools within Service Management: detail-level analytics; at-a-glance gauges; ad-hoc reporting; schedule, route, and certification information for technicians; work-order tracking; and inventory and equipment tracking with the addition of Infor Barcode. These capabilities also can be accessed via mobile devices or through a cloud platform.

Leading manufacturers are learning that the skills they’ve developed to control product quality are equally applicable to service offerings. Infor’s Service Management provides a comprehensive, scalable, and easily integrated platform to help them get there.

Posted by Ross Freeman, Product Manager, Infor10 ERP Discrete iEnterprise (XA)

Policy: Surface Transportation & Supply Chain

Valerie Hayden — 2011-09-27T13:37:18-04:00

Direct store delivery (DSD) can save consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers significant time, aggravation, and money, as “cutting out the middleman” usually does, boosting bottom lines through:

Improved cash flow
Reduced transportation and fulfillment costs
Increased sales thanks to satisfied customers and optimized point-of-sales (POS) opportunities

Yet the velocity of modern business can make something as simple as delivering fresh milk to a local grocery store a complicated transaction. DSD requires shared information throughout the supply chain for split-second decision-making even during routine delivery schedules. When routes are disrupted—a common occurrence due to extreme weather, deteriorating infrastructure, and mounting urban congestion—the need for visible, up-to-the-minute data is even greater. That’s a sobering thought for CPG executives, especially with the National Association of Manufacturers predicting that by 2020 “one-third of the entire US interstate system will be congested, impairing reliability and increasing the cost of goods movement.”¹

Fortunately, mobility tools—combined with scalable, integrated software solutions—can preserve DSD profitability gains and revenue growth. Infor is preparing for this mobile future both internally and with partners such as Numeric Computer System (NCS).

The NCS solution accommodates multiple go-to-market strategies for the DSD model in the food and beverage industry. The firm’s xMobility Development Suite offers customizable workflows to support multiple product management, as well as sales and delivery applications including:

Delivery
Presales
Merchandising
Vending
Sales force management

NCS’s DSD solutions are part of its Ready-to-Work family, supported by both the Xpedium xLink Mobility Connector (for integration into back-office ERP solutions) and Xpedium vehicle-tracking and -information systems. Available options include wired or wireless communications, GPS, barcode scanning, thermal or impact printing, camera/imaging, RFID, and many other peripherals and web services. These solutions allow low-visibility tasks such as start-of-day inspection and load verification to become part of a unified information stream that documents product flow.

What does all this mean? Primarily that key data on goods is always accessible, leading to significant DSD cost savings through:

Reduced labor hours spent tracking data or waiting for information or problem resolution
Lower transportation costs
Fewer damaged or obsolete goods

At the same time, these solutions supercharge DSD by giving CPG companies the ability to:

Deliver more goods to more places with fewer resources.
Accelerate the order-to-payment cycle, directly impacting positive cash flow.
Manage promotions and other sales programs more effectively and efficiently.

By integrating DSD solutions into existing enterprise-wide solutions, CPG firms extend visibility beyond the manufacturing plant even as they build a DSD data warehouse—a treasure trove of potential insights that business intelligence capabilities can transform into new opportunities.

DSD is here to stay, but it’s not enough anymore to simply eliminate the middleman; leading firms will use DSD—and the information that makes it possible—to reinvent their businesses and their industries.

Are you ready to join them? Share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment to this post.

Posted by Kari Miller, Senior Director, Product Management, System i

¹ Policy: Surface Transportation & Supply Chain, National Association of Manufacturers, www.nam.org

Tap Into More Service Revenues with Service Management

Infor — 2011-08-22T11:00:00-04:00

More than three-quarters of the US GDP comes via services, according to The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 2010. Smart manufacturers know this, and they’ve been looking for ways to differentiate their new products by adding new services to the value equation. Even now, according to the 2009 Annual Survey of Manufacturers from the US Census Bureau, manufacturers generate about 6% of total value of shipments from services. This includes installation, repair, and training support and services. In sectors such as industrial equipment or computers and electronics, that percentage is even higher.Yet manufacturers searching for service revenues should proceed with care: Customers demand responsiveness from service organizations, and they penalize firms that fail to deliver at world-class levels.

What does it take to meet world-class service levels? Simply this: staying one step ahead of customer inquiries and requests. Yet for most firms, this is anything but simple. It requires tracking every customer touch, transaction, and function; sharing that information with every employee who might touch that customer in the future; and monitoring and reporting customer service activities for day-to-day decision-making as well as strategic planning. Infor’s Service Management—a fully integrated, robust, scalable, and automated field service management solution for System i—improves service visibility and allows service organizations to proactively manage aftermarket services.

With Service Management you can meet customer demands, increase visibility into service performance metrics, and improve collaboration across the enterprise to find new revenue opportunities. Better customer relationship management increases sales opportunities and revenues while also boosting revenue per technician via improved scheduling. Not surprisingly, service profits also rise through improved forecasting and planning, spare parts management, warranty tracking, and contract management.

No two service organizations are alike, so you’ll need tools tailored to your firm’s needs—both in the office and in the field. Service Management includes all the flexible, digital tools you’ll require—with seamless, end-to-end integration including:

Customer service interaction management/call management
Service performance management for generating and maintaining complex equipment records
Customer web portal for faster, more accurate response and a web-based service order dashboard for providing visibility and control to dispatchers, supervisors, and customers
Electronic transactional capabilities, including Infor Barcode and RFID for tracking key components and high-value items
Mobile support, including mobile service entitlement management (contracts, warranties, and service policies) and mobile connectivity and service scheduling with complete field workforce management, workload forecasting capabilities, and a dynamic scheduling assistant

As your service organization succeeds, Service Management can smoothly scale to meet growing needs by supporting new sites, partners, subsidiaries, and franchisees. It ensures that everyone in the organization has up-to-the-minute information for confident decision-making that improves customer satisfaction and profitability. How’s that for service?

Let us know what you think, we would love to hear from you.

Posted by Joe Marino, Vice President, Development, Support, and Product Management, System i

Rave Reviews for Workspace: Coming Soon to System i

Infor — 2011-08-15T10:45:00-04:00

Guest post by Robert Russell, VP, System i development

So much ERP functionality is untapped—not because it isn’t useful or applicable, but because it’s literally untapped or, even worse, unknown. Organizations run myriad applications today. Multiple ERP and extension upgrades often leave employees who don’t have access to those tools unaware of powerful (but not readily apparent) information that could improve their decision making. Infor Workspace changes that by extending a helping hand to access hidden enterprise application data through a common, consumer-grade user interface.

Workspace rolled out in spring 2011 to rave reviews from IT pundits and—more importantly—Infor customers. Soon to be released for System i, Workspace is built on Microsoft SharePoint and blends a common user interface, in-context collaboration, alert management, and business intelligence. Workspace provides a single sign-on to all applications that users can access via SharePoint’s site pages, reaching out to applications on a local server, in the cloud, or at an entirely different site, while presenting data in a consistent (yet customizable) look.

Kevin Prouty, research director for enterprise applications, Aberdeen Group, writes, “As you would expect, customers are very positive about Infor Workspace. Several have stated that its role-based approach to presenting home screens and dashboards will lead to productivity improvements.” Because the Workspace tools are context-aware, they anticipate and adapt to user needs and interests based on the user’s role and business function.

Seamless navigation across Infor’s browser-enabled applications (the vast majority of our offerings) allows Workspace to automatically present your employees with critical data they might not even know they need, motivating staff to tap into important application data typically not on their radar. For example, a customer-service representative takes a call and is immediately alerted (regardless of where the information resides) to a range of customer information, including:

Location
Time zone
Currency preference
Purchasing history
Real-time product inventory level for likely purchases
Optimum pricing options for those goods
Contact information for, and access to, key internal and supply-chain staff

Workspace is simple to use, easy to understand, and offers your employees chances to learn, ask, suggest, share, and experience information in ways previously unavailable for enterprise applications.

“While there have been consistent interface advancements since business applications were first introduced, Infor Workspace is a completely new approach, says Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president, global product development, Infor. “It’s a step function advancement, designed to revolutionize the way users work with software and each other. No longer will business and social tools be separate. Infor Workspace seamlessly melds them together, making it as easy to interact with coworkers around the world as it is to use the application itself. We call it socializing the enterprise, and believe this kind of new user experience will not only result in dramatically improved employee satisfaction, but will also produce clear, measureable improvements in productivity, performance, and return on investment.”

Infor Workspace is currently available for Infor ERP LN, Infor ERP SyteLine, Infor EAM, Infor FMS SunSystems, and Infor Expense Management. It will soon be released for System i solutions, such as Infor ERP LX, Infor ERP System21, and Infor ERP XA. To help our customers embrace Workspace, we’re providing pre-built migration kits and incorporating the implementation into annual maintenance contracts with no separate licensing fees.

Are you ready to socialize your business? Tell us, we'd love to hear from you.

Are you as efficient and productive as you could be?

Infor — 2011-08-10T15:00:00-04:00

In today’s marketplace, you need to constantly look at how you do things, and ensure you do them well. You're off to a great start with a proven ERP system that works with your IBM System i platform, but you need to build automated processes that are carefully mapped to make your business more efficient. When that happens, you'll be able to work better, faster, and smarter than ever before. The key is to have a process mapping and automation tool that lets you quickly identify areas for improvement, reduce the number of tasks your teams have to handle, and apply your own business rules to software applications without modifying your ERP system.

Sounds good in theory, right? But you’re probably wondering where you can get such a tool. Well, you came to the right place. With Infor Workflow for System i, a drag-and-drop design tool, you can quickly create a graphical representation of any business activity. The tool provides you with:

"To do" action automation. Once the process map is complete, you can specify how to automate steps and start a process. Any process step can automatically place an entry on a user's "to do" list.
Automated task assignment. You can assign tasks to groups of users (or roles) and individuals. Your employees get easy access to the information they need to complete tasks. Plus, escalation rules ensure that important tasks are never forgotten.
Automated business logic execution. Not all processes require human intervention. Infor Workflow for System i can automatically execute business logic, decreasing the time it takes to complete a process and reducing the number of tasks your employees must perform.
Automated communication. The benefits of Workflow are not restricted to Infor ERP users. Any step in a process can automatically send a mobile text message or email to an individual or group of individuals, including suppliers and customers.
Event tracking. Within the application, all activities are recorded and traced by user, date, and time—providing you with both an evidence chain and the ability to identify bottlenecks quickly.

Could your company stand to benefit from better communication, continual process improvement, and greater productivity and lower costs? Whose couldn’t? With Infor Workflow for System i, you get a complete ERP workflow, modeler, and business process management solution combining a graphical process modeler with sophisticated automation. Why not see for yourself?

We’d like to hear from you. What are you doing to work harder, faster, and smarter? Would our tool be of help? Please leave your comments and feedback here.

Posted by Kari Miller, Senior Director, Product Management, System i, Infor

Are you continuing to be successful and meet market demand expectations?

Infor — 2011-08-10T13:00:00-04:00

As a manufacturer, you know the business environment is getting more complex by the day. It’s tough. Even though you're successfully using Infor ERP for IBM System i, you're still faced with market expectations such as customization and lower costs, as well as changing customer demand. You know that response to demand is critical, yet lengthy batch processing—and the inability to run multiple scenarios—stalls material resource planning (MRP) and other planning feedback, and cripples your ability to meet that demand. To continue competing successfully, you need a visual and graphical planning application designed specifically for your System i platform.

It may sound a dream, but the dream is a reality: Infor Visual Planner for System i, an advanced planning solution for our ERP customers on System i platforms. This module is designed for tight integration with Infor ERP XA, ERP LX, and ERP System21. Want to hear more about this application, which was built by planners for planners? This easy-to-adopt-and-use tool will help with:

Master level item scheduling—Blend customer orders with forecasts.
Multi-warehouse demand planning—Include orders from distribution sites and other production sites while planning the supplying warehouse.
Requirements planning—Plan new supply (production, purchase, and inter-site) orders and changes to existing orders.
Improved planning—Plan interactively so you can immediately re-plan as changes are made.
Planned supply order release—Interactively review and release new supply.
Planned demand transfer—Transfer planned demand to other production sites.

How would you like to improve capacity, deliver on time, effectively plan, and reduce operating costs? You can do that and more with Visual Planner for System i, which lets you interactively plan production and purchase orders—simultaneously considering both material and resource/labor requirements—to meet forecasted and actual customer requirements. Why not see for yourself?

We’d like to hear from you. What are you doing to meet demand? Would our tool be of help? Please leave your comments and feedback here.

Posted by Ross Freeman, Product Manager, Infor ERP XA

It's time to revitalize your System i—and this blog

Infor — 2011-08-10T11:00:00-04:00

We know it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us—but we think this is a great time to get you connected again so that you’ll have the tools you need to keep your System i platform going for years to come. We’re happy to announce the Infor Development Framework (IDF) technology, a next generation System i technology that ensures the future of your ERP software and allows you to use your reliable System i platform well into the future.

With IDF, you can protect your existing investments and gain cutting-edge features without having to go through an application or platform migration. You can also create intuitive role-based user interfaces and dynamic reports through simple configurations, and make your business and IT department more flexible and agile.

But that's not all. You can also better serve your customers, vendors, and partners over the Internet, by making your data available to them in a usable form, while keeping everything safe and secure. Plus, you can better support your non-ERP systems that help run day-to-day operations, yet are specific to certain departments—without burdening your support staff. In addition, you can create entire new applications that integrate seamlessly to your ERP backbone.

Finally, you can ensure that all of your systems work together, whether those systems are under one roof, in separate locations, or on different technology platforms. You can even tie in systems that are used by other companies, including your customers, vendors, and partners. Wherever your systems are located, you can make sure they communicate with each other.

Let’s dig into the IDF—here’s a run-down of all the parts and how each fits into the technology:

Infor Enterprise Integrator—Rapidly create and maintain System i applications with this advanced technology. Your users will be able to extensively develop each application to fit their needs and integrate your departmental systems to your ERP system without IT intervention so that all your systems will look and feel the same.
Infor Power-Link—Personalize your application, create workbenches, and get all the data you need with a mouse click using this full-featured user interface.
Infor Net-Link—After you personalize an application in Power-Link, hit the "Refresh" button and this browser-based solution will immediately send your changes to a Net-Link client.
Infor System-Link - Send XML data to any application that can receive XML—anytime, anywhere with System-Link.

IDF gives you a whole new range of choices—you can deploy your new application on IBM i, Linux, AIX, and Windows server platforms because IDF is written in Java, which means that it's platform-independent and supports Windows and Apple clients. But you'll still get the reliability, scalability, and lowest cost of ownership you depend on, because IDF is still built specifically to serve the dependable System i technology you’ve come to trust.

We have plenty more to say about the benefits of IDF, but why not see for yourself? Watch this quick overview video to learn more.

As always, we want to hear from you, what do you think about this technology? We’re open to your questions and feedback.

Posted by Joe Marino, Vice President, Development, Support, and Product Management, System i, Infor

System i User Conference 2010 Helps Plan for the Future

Valerie Hayden — 2010-10-11T12:07:32-04:00

Guest post by Jack Bullock, VP and General Manager, Infor System i

For those of you who joined us in Phoenix at our inaugural System i User Conference, thank you for making it such a success! We all had a great time, and it was refreshing to meet with nearly 400 customers. Your energy and enthusiasm is inspiring and further proves we really do have the greatest customers. We continue to build off of the momentum from the conference, and we’re working hard to deliver innovative programs and important product enhancements to you.

We’re in your corner.
Our goal is to provide the solutions you need to improve your organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, and ultimately your bottom line. Many of you have already taken advantage of our Flex program. We believe this program will help propel your organization forward, allowing you to move to the latest version of your current ERP system while taking advantage of exclusive pricing options.

Our partnership with IBM continues to flourish. With the recent release of IBM i Solutions Editions, we’ll continue to provide a simplified, easy-to-manage, high-performance IT environment for your core business applications. Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting program.

And last, but not least, we’re already planning our next System i User Conference for September 2011, and we hope you can attend. We’ll incorporate your feedback into next year’s event and make it even better for you. If you have any suggestions or questions, I encourage you to contact your account or support rep. It’s our pleasure to help you in any way we can.

What was your favorite part of the System i User Conference? What have been your key takeaways? Share your ideas on how to improve next year's conference by leaving a comment to this post.

IBM i 7.1 Upgrade

Rebecca Sandrue — 2010-06-24T15:05:14-04:00

Guest post by Dan Sundt, Senior IT Specialist, IBM

Your company is one of tens of thousands running IBM i. It’s possible that you’ve been running it for over two decades, from AS/400 to iSeries, System i, and now Power Systems. If so, you’re not unlike many executives around the globe in a variety of industries—you’re comfortable with the strength of the platform, you’re looking forward to continued low operating costs, and you enjoy the high ROI a proven platform delivers. But don’t get too comfortable and secure. Information technology evolves at a blistering pace, and there are now more ways for IBM i to provide competitive advantage, minimize IT risks, and improve profitability.

IBM has been putting intellectual muscle into IBM i, making it a strong business solution for today, tomorrow, and years to come. Last fall, IBM released enhancements to IBM i version 6.1, and recently introduced IBM i 7.1. This latest operating system release/upgrade ensures that your company is running a leading-edge business operating system with up-to-date business capabilities. Within the familiar structure of IBM i, your company can reap the benefits of enhanced functions including:

DB2^® for i support for XML: DB2, the integrated database for IBM i, now natively supports XML. XML data can now be stored in its native format, split into relational database columns, or created from existing database objects. Support for OmniFind Text Search in DB2 adds simpler access to non-structured data that is often stored in XML format. DB2 for i support for XML helps companies exchange information between customers, suppliers, and partners, improving communications with external applications and organizations.
PowerHA™ SystemMirror for i: Asynchronous geographic mirroring with PowerHA extends the distance supported for multisite DR solutions, and supports both internal disk and SAN-based solutions. New PowerHA LUN level switching provides a data center a high-availability solution, where a set of disks on IBM DS8000 or IBM DS6000 are automatically switched between servers for scheduled maintenance or in the event of a failure. PowerHA allows a company to extend the distance between locations for disaster recovery implementation, thus providing a robust, easy-to-manage, high-availability disaster recovery solution.
Virtualization enhancements: Virtualization support with PowerVM is extended to enable IBM i 6.1 to host IBM i 7.1 partitions and storage—functionality that allows for simpler testing of a new release before a software upgrade. IBM i 7.1 also can host an IBM i 6.1 partition, enabling companies to keep an application that requires an earlier release after upgrading their main application environment. This support is available with POWER6® and POWER7™ servers, and IBM i also supports AIX® and Linux® client partitions. With the increased flexibility available via virtualization enhancements, companies can reduce IT infrastructure costs and, because they are no longer locked into their existing system or applications, are afforded the freedom to upgrade while knowing key applications can migrate with them.
Systems management enhancements for IBM Systems Director Navigator for i: Allows companies to set a target server that can run IBM i 5.4, 6.1, or 7.1, thus enabling the management server to run in one place with a single browser, and to be used in managing multiple operating system environments. Navigator’s performance management and investigator capabilities are enhanced with additional storage and tape metrics, plus disk response time and Java memory perspectives. IBM Systems Director management server is also enhanced to monitor and manage target IBM i environments, including management of program temporary fixes (PTFs). Systems Director provides an integrated platform management solution for IBM i and heterogeneous servers that, along with system management enhancements, delivers evermore simplified systems management and, thus, reduced operational costs.
Security enhancements: Allows an administrator to turn on and off ASP encryption (which became available with IBM i 6.1), as well as permitting the data encryption key to be changed for existing users. A new database feature called “field procedures” (user-written exit programs executed every time a column is changed or new values are inserted) enables column-level encryption in a database table for sensitive fields of data without requiring any application changes. The IBM i 7.1 security enhancements both improve system performance (application changes take a significant amount of time as all the data in the disk pool needs to be processed) and, more importantly, allows companies to establish the appropriate level of security for specific sensitive data.
Others: Rational^® software development product enhancements (such as IBM Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, which simplifies the development of transaction processing applications for mobile devices and web services), Zend PHP enhancements, web-application serving enhancements, and more. A long list of IBM i 7.1 features allows clients to reduce cost, improve service, and manage risk of their IT infrastructures.

If your company sat on the sidelines while other firms took advantage of IBM i 6.1 upgrades, you’ll be pleased to learn that it’s possible to leap directly to 7.1 from IBM i 5.4.

What’s the bottom line? You can now reduce costs, improve service, and better manage the risks of your IT infrastructure with these just-released IBM i 7.1 enhancements. Better yet, more enhancements are on the way. Perhaps most importantly, IBM i 7.1 is supported on a wide range of new and existing hardware: Power Systems servers and blades with POWER7 processors, Power Systems servers and blades with POWER6/6+ processors, and System i servers with POWER5/5+ processors.

Your choice of IBM i has kept your company competitive and growing for a long time. Why not leverage the latest business advantages found in IBM i 7.1?