IBM Corp has turned to UK application development tools firm Lincoln Software Ltd to help it provide a route to the Internet for its CICS transaction server customers. Lincoln, of Macclesfield, Cheshire, which bought fellow Macclesfield company Ipsys Software Plc a couple of years ago, has been working with IBM’s labs at Hursley to provide IBM customers with tools to enable them to hook up their CICS servers to the internet or intranet. Lincoln’s Ipsys Engineer will, the company claims, be the first product to generate Hypertext Markup Language, HTML, for CICS, and automatically produce all the necessary security and web interface code. Lincolns differentiator, says managing director Steve Law, is its Ipsys ToolBuilder, a Meta tool, which enables the rapid development of other tools. As well as licensing this product to other tools builders, the company says it has used ToolBuilder to develop rapidly new tools, and in particular to enhance Ipsys Engineer for the IBM application. The IBM agreement is to date fairly informal, but is revenue generating for Lincoln.
