Unibol Gets Certified by Big Blue
While application development in the relatively homogeneous AS/400 environment typically offers little in the way of pitfalls or hazards, development in the heterogeneous world of Windows NT sometimes offers a tour-de-force of the unexpected. Because of the complexion of different hardware devices from any of a number of different OEMs that often constitutes a Windows NT Server system, it’s sometimes difficult for organizations to assess the behavior of a particular application across different NT boxes.
As a partial step toward easing customer concerns in this regard, Unibol Ltd. (www.unibol.com) announced in early April that its Unibol36 and Unibol400 for NT products have been branded with Server Proven Certification from IBM Corp. and are now certified as fully compliant with IBM’s Netfinity Windows NT Servers.
More than anything else, Unibol managing director Ian Graham says the Server Proven Certification signification bestowed on both Unibol36 and Unibol400 for NT provides existing IBM shops with some much-needed peace of mind. "The Server Proven Certification clearly identifies Unibol36 and Unibol400 for NT as high-caliber products which the IBM market has come to expect," Graham maintains. "[Because of this] AS/400 Independent Software Vendors and corporate end-users can adopt Windows NT and stay within the IBM world, using the high performance and very reliable Netfinity servers."
Unibol400 for NT is an application development and execution environment that provides an essential duplication of the features and capabilities of the AS/400 on the Windows NT platform. Unibol36 allows System/36 applications to be migrated and rehosted on Microsoft Windows NT as well as on a variety of Unix platforms.
In other Unibol news, the software vendor recently announced the availability of Unibol Demo400, a tool which the company positions as a software environment that allows IBM AS/400 ISVs to execute fully functional AS/400 applications on a Windows NT laptop. According to Unibol, Unibol Demo400 generates native Windows NT executables from AS/400 source code, with the resulting applications looking and running as they do on an AS/400.