In-Depth

December Industry News

• 12/01/1999

International Software Company (I$C) is opening its first U.S. office in suburban Milwaukee. I$C provides automation solutions for IBM OS/390 and MVS operating systems that can be run from PC workstations. I$C develops and markets the E-GEN suite of software solutions, aimed at providing enterprisewide information system documentation and application stream generation. Based on a new repository technology, E-GEN tools help leverage the sizable investment of a company’s information system.

E-GEN becomes the repository of the combined knowledge of all systems and operations staff involved in documentation and application launch. Working with the data center’s norms and standards and quality assurance programs, E-GEN provides a structure that remains intact through personnel changes, thereby offering continuity that is critical in providing 24x7 operation.

Current users of E-GEN tools include banking, financial, manufacturing, distribution, insurance and government data centers. With an annual growth rate of 20 percent, I$C is rapidly expanding to keep pace with the demand for their software tools.

I$C supports and services its customers through an international network of offices and distributors. Full support centers are located in Brookfield, Wis., Brussels, Belgium and Paris. Distributors are located in Germany, Italy and Argentina.

For more information on I$C or the E-GEN suite of products, call (262) 821-8663, or visit www.iscsoftware.com.

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Companies using OS/390 can manage their enterprises – from security to event management – on an end-to-end basis. By using Computer Associates’ (CA) Unicenter TNG for OS/390, clients with OS/390-centric workloads (as well as clients with plans to deploy OS/390 as part of an enterprise-wide management platform) can realize the full benefit of the Unicenter TNG management architecture. Applications, databases, network components and other resources can be discovered, monitored, visualized and managed using the host as a centralized management server. IBM and CA companies are betting that "OS/390 will become the e-business server of choice," said David Carlucci, General Manager for the S/390 Division at IBM, at an October news conference in New York announcing the IBM-CA alliance.

Extending the full management platform spectrum of Unicenter TNG to OS/390 represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of information technology, because it extends the operational attributes of IBM’s strategic environment with the management disciplines of a powerful architecture for administering distributed enterprises.

A key component of Unicenter TNG for OS/390 is the Distributed State Machine (DSM), a management process that centralizes the discovery of and interactivity with all objects and resources within an OS/390 management domain. DSM gathers real-time information from software agents monitoring managed objects, providing policy-driven management; agent control and interaction; Web-enabled administration; and seamless integration across platforms. Deploying and managing multi-tier workloads, such as Lotus Notes and SAP R/3, become much easier under a common infrastructure.

Benefits of Unicenter TNG for OS/390 include Visualization Across Platforms – 2D or 3D visualization services to Web-enable OS/390 solutions for e-business, and Neugent Predictive Technology – an intelligent agent technology which provides genuine predictive capabilities for proactive problem detection and resolution. Using neural networking algorithms, Neugents technology predicts the effects of changing system characteristics on system performance. The following Unicenter TNG agents will be available on the OS/390 platform: OS/390 base system agent; CICS; OS/390 UNIX Services; CA-IDMS; CA-Datacom, DB2; MQSeries; Lotus Notes/Domino, SAP R3, PeopleSoft, BaaN; Oracle and Novell NetWare for OS/390.

"Unicenter TNG for OS/390 represents a convergence that many analysts have been predicting, but that has eluded the industry until today," said CA Chairman and CEO Charles B. Wang. "The industry has sought to make the OS/390 platform a full participant in the distributed, Web-enabled environments that modern enterprises must deploy. [This] announcement effectively enables a new class of OS/390 business solutions."

IBM’s alliance with CA begs the question, "Where is IBM/Tivoli with its OS/390 support?" Carlucci said that companies must accept that customers rely on software from a variety of vendors, and so, must provide support for a wide range of products. "There isn’t a direct one-to-one relationship between what software the companies offer," Carlucci said. "And many customers have already chosen their software." Tivoli also has plans for issuing its own OS/390 management software.

What good are e-Business applications if you can’t manage them? Teaming up with Computer Associates, IBM has added new Web-enabled business solutions that combine the strengths of the S/390 Multiprise 3000 Server and OS/390 operating system technologies with CA’s enterprise system management infrastructure. The alliance maximizes the clients’ e-business resource investments by aligning the pricing models for CA software licensed in conjunction with IBM’s Multiprise 3000 e-business servers – a new family of S/390 servers designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises grow existing applications and add new workloads.

In addition, to cut the costs of maintenance and minimize the administration of software licenses in high-end enterprise environments, CA’s Millennium pricing now caps maintenance at 600 MIPs and provides freedom to transfer coverage between defined sites, should IT resources be reorganized. During the transition – for up to three years – companies pay none of CA’s VSE software licensing fees.

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Seven independent service vendors (ISVs) (Funk Software, Allaire Corporation, Planet-Intra, Resonate, Sendmail, Paylinx and Esoftware) have completed Netfinity ServerProven testing on the new Netfinity 4000R.

IBM’s Netfinity ServerProven Program reduces integration risks by allowing developers to validate their business solutions on Netfinity servers in real-world environments.

The Netfinity 4000R server enables ISPs and ASPs to offer their customers content-rich services, high-volume e-commerce applications, storage-intense Web hosting and network security. Key features include:

• Ideal sized 1-3/4"(1U) packaging, providing maximum computing power per square foot

• Up to two Intel 500 MHz processors per unit – providing the capability for 84 processors per industry standard rack

• Maximum 2GB memory per unit

• Supports up to 1.5 Terabytes of storage

• Supports Windows and Linux environments

Further details on the program can be found at www.pc.ibm.com/us/netfinityserverproven.

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SERENA Software Inc. (Burlingame, Calif.) will offer options for DB2 and IMS for its StarTool file and data management solution. StarTool is a member of the SERENA FULL.CYCLE Enterprise Solution, an integrated set of software products, open cross-platform architecture and consulting services, which enables businesses to manage software changes across the enterprise at any phase of the application life cycle.

This support not only extends the market for StarTool to developers of DB2 and IMS based applications, but also to large organizations that require a single product to manage the delivery of critical applications regardless of the underlying database (i.e., VSAM, DB2 or IMS).

"With DB2 and IMS playing such an important role in many companies’ computing environments, having a cost-effective solution for development to edit and test these databases is essential," says Mike Egan, Program Director for META Group’s Enterprise Data Center Strategies. "Product suite offerings, such as SERENA’s, that include this capability, provide customers with an attractive enterprise solution."

StarTool for DB2 is scheduled for availability during the fourth quarter of ’99; StarTool for IMS, during the first quarter of 2000.