COMMON, IBM accepting nominations for iSeries award |
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By Matt Stansberry, News Editor
05 Dec 2005 | Search400.com |
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For the second year in a row, IBM and COMMON are hosting the eServer iSeries Innovation Awards. The program was created to showcase achievements of iSeries shops that create cutting-edge technologies and practices.
Nominations for the iSeries Innovation Awards for 2006 are being accepted now through December 30, 2005. Award winners will be announced at the IBM eServer iSeries Innovation Awards banquet at the Spring COMMON conference in Minneapolis on March 27, 2006. The winners and their teams will be honored at a gala award ceremony and receive a package of prizes.
The iSeries shops can be nominated in the following five categories:
Application Deployment Award: Best practice award for the innovative deployment of industry and business applications or custom applications, including RPG, COBOL, Java and other custom apps running on the iSeries.
Business Resiliency Award: Best practice award focused on business continuity and resiliency, and demonstrated high availability, security and compliance, and business protection solutions using the iSeries.
Infrastructure Simplification Award: Best practice award that demonstrates cost-effective server management, as well as application integration, capacity on demand and overall IT simplification deployed on the iSeries.
i5/OS Focus Award: This award is for the best practice of using i5/0S as the strategic and primary operating environment for running an entire business.
Education Excellence Award: Best practice in education excellence for an iSeries customer, college or university that has demonstrated outstanding commitment to the iSeries community and provided ongoing education support of iSeries technology and solutions.
Last year's winners were honored at an invitation-only dinner at the Spring 2005 COMMON conference. Winners included U-Bix Konica Minolta, Kingland Systems Corp., GHY International, ScottKlement.com and the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.
U-Bix Konica Minolta, an equipment company in New Zealand, won for two innovative projects based on the iSeries. Project PDA enabled U-Bix technicians on customer service calls to "talk" directly to the iSeries platform back in the home office using PDA devices with cellular modems. The second project, Project Sentinel, enabled the iSeries server's autonomic capabilities to attach customers' copiers and printers directly to U-Bix Konica Minolta's iSeries to detect issues before becoming problems. Sensors in the copies and printers alert U-Bix Konica Minolta to a potential failure, which automatically dispatches the technician or the "remote diagnostics" support desk to seize the problem before it occurs.
Kingland Systems Corp., a software services and hosting company, received the Insurance Award. Kingland Systems has customers in over 80 countries that rely on the company's continued service. By using the iSeries platform and implementing strong procedures, Kingland was able to switch from its Clear Lake, Iowa, data center to remote sites without interruption and deliver an exceptional record of availability.
GHY International, a Canadian brokerage and international trade company, received the Innovation Award for Infrastructure. With an IT staff of three, this iSeries customer consolidated 14 servers -- Windows servers, Linux servers and Domino on WinNT -- onto two iSeries platforms, including existing business applications. After the first year of running the system, GHY was 14% under budget with nearly $100,000 of savings that could be directly attributed to the simplification process on the iSeries platform.
ScottKlement.com, a Web site of tutorials designed to assist iSeries users on various programs and applications, was honored with the Intellectual Award. Scott Klement developed a Web site filled with in-depth tutorials and open source software, making it possible for the average RPG programmer to access Web services from leading companies; write sockets-based communications programs in RPG IV; read and write files in the IFS directly from RPG IV programs; and process XML documents from an RPG program.
The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM), a two-year accredited, private college with campuses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Orange County, Calif., received the Invention Award. FIDM created a secure online site for industry contacts to post job opportunities for students. Last year, FIDM expanded this job service to more than 20,000 alumni who can search posted jobs using various search criteria via the Internet through the FIDM portal.
Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Matt Stansberry, News Editor
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