Veryant, a provider of COBOL modernization tools, announced a new release of its isCOBOL Application Platform Suite (APS) for developing, deploying, and modernizing COBOL applications. This is the vendor's sixth product update in two years. isCOBOL's value proposition, the vendor says, is offering users the ability to continue programming in COBOL, and at the same time, modernize and deploy applications across multiple platforms in an open Java framework.

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IBM has announced new systems highly-tuned and optimized to help clients more quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data so they can anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks. "We are looking to help our clients reduce costs and achieve better value faster. It is both of those pieces that make the notion of workload optimized systems compelling for our clients these days," states Bernie Spang, IBM's director of strategy and marketing for information management software.

Talend, a provider of open source data management software, today announced the release of Talend 4.0. With this major upgrade to the company's flagship data management solutions, Talend is delivering an integrated data management platform that combines data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) within a single solution, enabling Talend customers to further streamline and reduce the complexity of their critical data management projects.

Greenplum Software, a data infrastructure company, has introduced what it calls the industry's first commercially available "Enterprise Data Cloud" platform. Called Greenplum Chorus, the solution offers self-service provisioning, data collaboration and data services features to complement traditional enterprise data warehouses. "Greenplum Chorus is a distributed software platform that is run on premises within an enterprise — potentially spanning multiple data centers and encompassing tens or hundreds of warehouses and marts," Ben Werther, director of product management for Greenplum, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The product is available under subscription or perpetual licensing models, Werther adds.

Holland Hospital, a 209-bed hospital in Western Michigan that is nationally recognized for quality practices and exceptional patient care, is implementing the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform as its enterprise integration engine. Holland Hospital chose Ensemble to address several integration challenges such as the need to interconnect more systems across the hospital and to integrate with electronic medical record (EMR) systems at affiliated physician groups. Ensemble, which is used to develop and integrate mission-critical applications, leverage previous software investments through composite applications, and establish an enterprise service bus or SOA infrastructure, offered significant advantages over Holland Hospital's legacy integration platform.

The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), has announced the availability of a virtual educational program that will run concurrently with the annual Oracle users event COLLABORATE. Presented jointly by the IOUG, as well as the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest), the COLLABORATE 10 conference will take place April 18-22 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center in Las Vegas.

Spreadsheets, which have long been a disruptive force to enterprise IT, to some extent are the "killer" applications that helped drive the adoption of personal computers (PCs) in the enterprise. Spreadsheet products such as Lotus 1,2,3 - and early versions of Excel on the Mac - saw rapid adoption by business users. Inevitably, these users pushed the boundaries of the spreadsheet model, using spreadsheets as databases, and even to develop simple business applications. In the late 1980s, it was typical to see corporate IT rolling out massively expensive mainframe-based solutions, while departmental users got their real work done on spreadsheets running on cheap PCs.

In a presentation titled, "OpenInsight 9.2 Features and Functionality: An Overview," Mike Ruane, president and CEO, Revelation Software, will provide insight into the many new features and enhancements in OpenInsight version 9.2. Attendees to this session will be given a brief overview and demonstration of many of the new features and functionality in OpenInsight 9.2.

The Rocket U2 team has set the dates for U2 University. The U.S. event will be November 9-11, 2010, in Denver, Colo. The U.K. and Australia events have been scheduled for the first quarter of 2011.

Entrinsik Inc., a provider of operational reporting and analysis solutions, will present at this year's SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010, SugarCRM's fourth annual user and customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and industry experts from around the world.

COLLABORATE 10 will at long last bring together Sun and Oracle users for the first time under one roof. Ian Abramson, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, talks with DBTA about what the group is planning for the April conference in Las Vegas, and how the integration of customers and technology is being handled by Oracle and the IOUG.

COLLABORATE 10 will at long last bring together Sun and Oracle users for the first time under one roof. Ian Abramson, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, recently talked with Database Trends and Applications about what the group is planning for the April conference in Las Vegas, and how the integration of customers and technology is being handled by Oracle and the IOUG.

Oracle today announced the latest release of its Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System, Release 11.1.2. As part of the 11.1.2 release, there are three new applications: two in the financial close and financial reporting area, Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management, Oracle Hyperion Disclosure Management, and a third application that is a purpose-built planning module for public sector organizations called Oracle Hyperion Public Sector Planning and Budgeting, Hari Sankar, vice president of EPM Product Management, Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. There are also significant enhancements to the existing portfolio of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management applications such as Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Data Relationship Management, Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, as well as Oracle Essbase.

The latest release of Oracle Berkeley DB, the small footprint open source embeddable database engine for mission-critical "edge" applications, is now available for downloading. Oracle Berkeley DB 11g Release 2 introduces a new SQL API, based on SQLite, which is familiar to a large developer community, and paves the way to a wider array of applications that the database may be able to support.

Oracle has announced AutoVue 20.0, the first release of the product planned from day-one under Oracle ownership. AutoVue joined Oracle as part of the Agile acquisition in 2007 and solves one central challenge, Thierry Bonfante, director product strategy for Oracle's AutoVue solutions, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "What we provide is a way to open any files, any documents that have been generated by any applications whether it is very simple applications like Microsoft Office or TIFF [Tagged Image File Format] or JPEG [Joint Photographic Experts Group] up to the very advanced 2D and 3D CADs [computer aided designs] that are used in aerospace and defense, construction, utilities, oil and gas."

Embarcadero Technologies has introduced DBArtisan XE, the newest addition to the DBArtisan family of heterogeneous database administration tools. With support for multiple database platforms "out of the box," DBArtisan XE enables database administrators (DBAs) to maximize the performance, availability and security of all major database management systems, including Oracle and MySQL, as well as SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase from a single interface.

Lyzasoft recently introduced the latest version of its collaborative business intelligence software, Lyza. The version 2.0 release blends business intelligence and Web 2.0 technologies, allowing analytical communities within an enterprise to synthesize data from many sources, visually analyze the data, and socialize their findings among the workgroup - all via an entirely self-serve model.

Entrinsik Inc., a provider of operational reporting and analysis solutions, will present at this year's SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010, SugarCRM's fourth annual user and customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and industry experts from around the world.

HiT Software, Inc., a provider of data integration, replication and transformation products, has announced that the newest version of DBMoto, its change data capture (CDC) and data replication solution, has been expanded to include multi-server synchronization. In addition, the release also offers a dynamic, configurable GUI (graphical user interface), and provides updates for remote administration and advanced security options, as well as additional database support. DBMoto 7 will be released in the second quarter of 2010.

The opportunity for progress for the planet is clear, emphasized Dr. Bob Sutor, vice president, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group, and Jean Staten Healy, head of IBM's Linux strategy, during a presentation they made at Novell BrainShare 2010 last week titled "Linux as a Catalyst for a Smarter Planet." With the world becoming increasingly instrumented and interconnected, virtually all things, processes, and ways of working are becoming intelligent. Only Linux is able to provide the operating system from embedded devices gathering the data to supercomputers analyzing the data. Linux can support dynamic infrastructures that can help drive down costs, and are intelligent and secure.

Attunity Ltd., a provider of real-time data integration and event capture software, has announced a new release of its change data capture (CDC) and operational data replication (ODR) software with support for SQL Server 2008 R2. The software is now available with the Attunity CDC Suite for SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), and a free trial is available for download on the Attunity website.

Pentaho Corporation, an open source business intelligence (BI) vendor, today announced a unified extract, transform, and load (ETL), modeling and data visualization integrated development environment (IDE) for BI applications. The solution, Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) 4.0, is part of what the company calls its "Agile BI" initiative, announced in November.

HiT Software, Inc., a provider of data integration, replication and transformation products, has announced that the newest version of DBMoto, its change data capture (CDC) and data replication solution, has been expanded to include multi-server synchronization. In addition, the release also offers a dynamic, configurable GUI, and provides updates for remote administration and advanced security options, as well as additional database support. DBMoto 7 will be released in the second quarter of 2010.

SAP AG and Sybase have announced two new solutions for mobile workers to carry out key business and customer relationship management processes via iPhone and Windows Mobile. Built on the Sybase Unwired Platform, the mobile solutions extend the capabilities of SAP Business Suite applications, including SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and also can be customized to tap into a variety of back-end data sources, including databases, web services, files and any enterprise application that leverages service-oriented architecture.

Entrinsik Inc., a provider of operational reporting and analysis solutions, will present at this year's SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010, SugarCRM's fourth annual user and customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and industry experts from around the world.

Revelation Software is entering beta testing for OpenInsight 9.2. Comprehensive details of the release will be presented at the Revelation Users' Conference, April 27-30, at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, with general availability planned for May or June. OpenInsight, version 9.2, contains many new features and enhancements, including three key components: O4W (OpenInsight for Web); the SQL Connector; and OpenInsight for D3, Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Rapid Insight Inc., a data analytics tool provider, announced the launch of a new integration tool that enables users to visually map where data is originating and where it's being applied. The solution, called Veera, is built upon an earlier Rapid Insight product, Data Integration 2.0, and is intended to help users overcome common barriers to data access, ad-hoc analysis, and report generation.

NorthScale, Inc., a Silicon Valley software startup, has launched with the introduction of data infrastructure software optimized for the data management requirements of web applications and cloud computing environments. The company was founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, and NorthScale's technical team collectively represents about 60% of the lines of code behind the memcached project, James Phillips, co-founder and chief strategy officer of NorthScale, tells 5 Minute Briefing.