Jack Henry Picks Up Yellow Hammer to Fight Bank Fraud . . . Patagonia Improved E-Commerce Search
Function Just in Time for Christmas . . . Monarch RFID Printers Certified for Use with Manhattan
Associates WMS App . . . IAD's ResNet System Tops the 2 Million Mark for Rooms Booked in 2003 . . .
Momentum Debuts 'Portable' Jacana inTuator for Road-Warrior-Based iSeries Access . . . BOScom Debuts
BOSaNOVA WTC-400, Windows CE.NET-Based Thin Client . . .
<b>Jack Henry Picks Up Yellow Hammer to Fight Bank Fraud</b>
<a target="new" href="http://www.jackhenry.com">Jack Henry &amp; Associates</a> has a new antifraud solution for its banking customers. The Monet, Missouri, software company last week acquired <a
target="new" href="http://www.4yellowhammer.com">Yellow Hammer Software</a> and is now offering
its Fraud Detective software to customers. Fraud Detective allows banks to monitor the activity of every
account in order to single out suspicious and fraudulent transactions. Yellow Hammer wrote the application
in Java and designed the software to integrate directly with OS/400-based banking applications, such as
Jack Henry's Silverlake, as well as with Windows and Unix banking applications. It appears to be a good
match all around. Jack Henry had been looking to acquire an anti-fraud solution for some time, and several
Jack Henry customers had already used Fraud Detective. The bond between the two companies is further
extended by the fact that several of Yellow Hammer's employees came from Jack Henry. All of Yellow
Hammer's 10 employees at its Gardendale, Alabama, headquarters will join Jack Henry's Birmingham
office, where 80 employees currently work. Yellow Hammer will be operated as a fully owned subsidiary.
<b>Patagonia Improved E-Commerce Search Function Just in Time for Christmas</b>
The Christmas buying season is no time to discover your Web store front isn't up to snuff in the usability
department, especially when you're renowned catalog retailer <a target="new"
href="http://www.patagonia.com">Patagonia</a>. The $200 million clothes-maker, a user of <a
target="new" href="http://www.commercialware.com">CommercialWare</a>'s OS/400 multi-channel
merchandise management system, needed a way to reveal the variety of clothing available on its Web site,
"while giving customers the means to find specific items in two to three clicks of the mouse," says Perry
Klebahn, executive vice president of direct sales at Patagonia. The company installed, just before the
Christmas rush, <a target="new" href="http://www.endeca.com">Endeca</a>'s InFront, a two-pronged,
Java-based suite of software that includes Endeca Search and Guided Navigation. According to Endeca's
Web site, Guided Navigation delivers the power to "help users to find what they need, regardless of how
they choose to ask," the company says. "The search engine can find word-form variations, like correct
spellings and plurals, and can find related concepts, answer natural language questions, and suggest
alternative queries. This leads to highly relevant results, and fewer 'no results found' responses." Other etailers using Endeca's search software include Barnes &amp; Noble, Brookstone, Crate and Barrel, and
Eddie Bauer.
<b>Monarch RFID Printers Certified for Use with Manhattan Associates WMS App</b>
Users of <a target="new" href="http://www.manh.com">Manhattan Associates</a>' supply chain
execution software can now use Monarch printers from <a target="new"
href="http://www.paxar.com">Paxar</a> to generate radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for
tracking shipments in the distribution center. Last week the partners announced that the Monarch 9855
RFID printer/encoder has been tested and approved by Manhattan Associates to work with its Warehouse
Management System and Trading Partner Management applications. The Warehouse Management System
is Manhattan's flagship software, and it supports OS/400 and other platforms. "Innovative companies can
realize the tracking, information, and cost-savings benefits of RFID technology today," says Rick Bauer,
Paxar's senior director of RFID technical research. Paxar guarantees that its solution will be compliant with
the electronic product code (EPC) standard for RFID tags proposed by the <a target="new"
href="http://www.epcglobal.org">EPCglobal</a> organization, which took over the work of the <a
target="new" href="http://www.autoidcenter.org">Auto-ID Center</a> last October.
<b>IAD's ResNet System Tops 2 Million Mark for Rooms Booked in 2003</b>
An OS/400-based hotel reservation system developed by <a target="new"
href="http://www.iadusa.com">Inter-American Data</a>, using <a target="new"
href="http://www.lansa.com">LANSA</a> technology, accounted for 2,000,000 nights of booked rooms
over the Web last year, the companies announced last week. Inter-American Data launched ResNet in 1998
as a way to let hotels chains manage their bookings over the Internet. The system, which was created as an
extension to IAD's OS/400-based Lodging Management System, lets customers check hotel room
availability, place reservations, pay by credit card, and receive a confirmation number in real-time over the
Web. Today 80 hotels are using ResNet, including several Las Vegas casinos, such as Mandalay Bay,
Luxor, The Venetian, and The Riviera, as well as Atlantic City's The Borgata and the Gaylord Opryland in
Nashville, Tennessee. Although the exact number of rooms booked through ResNet has not been tallied,
Inter-American Data's chief technology officer, Criss Chrestman, says ResNet was likely used to reserve 4
percent of all room bookings made over the Internet in 2003. "In 2002, $3.2 billion in rooms were booked
via the Internet on hotel Web sites," he says. "The 80 hotels running ResNet generated a significant portion
of this business at a very low transaction cost."
<b>Momentum Debuts 'Portable' Jacana inTuator for Road-Warrior-Based iSeries Access</b>
<a target="new" href="http://www.jacana.com">Momentum Utilities</a> last week announced a new
"portable" mode for its Jacana inTuator query and reporting software for OS/400 servers. Initially launched
last May (see <a target="new" href="http://www.midrangeserver.com/mso/mso050603story02.html">"Momentum Launches Reporting Tool Integrated with MAPICS"</a>), the inTuator is a
client/server application that lets users manipulate, format, and analyze OS/400 data from a Web browser,
via three unique subcomponents, called inSets, inStores, and inTuates. The new portable mode makes
iSeries data available to corporate "road warriors," even if they're not connected to the network. Keith
Dickins, Momentum's chief executive, expects most inTuator customers to use the new portable mode.
"Our objective with inTuator has always been to provide the right tools, at the right price, to quickly and
easily access, extract, analyze, and present our customers' iSeries data as information, so they can evaluate
key business questions and make informed decisions," Dickins says. The inTuator has an affinity for data
from <a target="new" href="http://www.mapics.com">MAPICS</a>'s ERP package, as well as <a
target="new" href="http://www.geac.com">Geac</a>'s System/21 and <a target="new"
href="http://www.smed.com">Siemens</a>' MedSeries4 applications.
<b>BOScom Debuts BOSaNOVA WTC-400, Windows CE.NET-Based Thin Client</b>
<a target="new" href="http://www.bosweb.com">BOScom</a> rounded out its new line of thin-client
terminals last week with the introduction of the BOSâNOVA WTC-400. Based on the Windows CE.NET
operating system, the WTC-400 is specifically tailored for iSeries shops that need a simple, cost-effective
solution for connecting to an OS/400 server, a <a target="new"
href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft</a> Terminal Server, or a <a target="new"
href="http://www.citrix.com">Citrix</a> server, BOScom says. The WTC-400 features a 400 MHz <a
target="new" href="http://www.via.com">VIA</a> processor with 64 MB RAM, 32 MB DOM, and an
array of Windows-based connectivity and productivity software, such as Internet Explorer 6.0; a POP3 email client; Word and Excel; PowerPoint and PDF viewers; and TN5250e, TN3270e, RDP, and ICA
connectivity. Martin Pladgeman, president of BOScom affiliate BOSaNOVA, says the WTC-400 will
provide a better user experience than other thin clients using the same operating system. "Other CE.NETbased thin clients support only full-screen applications, while the BOSâNOVA WTC-400 allows
management of multiple browser windows within a single browser instance," Pladgeman says. "As a result,
even pop-up windows, which typically require the user to close the new window in order to revert to the
parent window, are no longer a distraction to the user's workflow." Like BOScom's other Windows- and
Linux-based thin clients, the WTC-400 supports the BOSâNOVA 122-key keyboard, which BOScom says
increases user productivity by providing the full range of function keys for both Windows Terminal Server,
as well as iSeries applications.