Last month Synon Europe Ltd of London and Marcam Solutions Ltd of Warwick signed a worldwide partnership agreement under which around half of Marcam’s Mapix XA product line will be developed using Synon/2E. The new range is a fully upgraded version of the Synon Model Applications Financials software launched by Synon in 1990. The Mapics XA is currently in beta test and will be rolling out in the first quarter of next year. The Mapics DB and Prism databases will also be assimilated into Synon/2E and thus software engineering enabled. As the CASEware is independent of the environment, generated Mapics systems will be able to run on any system supported by Synon’s generators and Mapics XA will be able to run in client-server with AS/400 servers and Windows or OS/2 clients. The companies hope that through this alliance, established AS/400 customers will be able to upgrade more easily to the new product. The agreement also offer the opportunity to focus on the larger multinational companies. Synon has announced three new products so mainframe and S/3X users can more easily migrate to the AS/400. The Texas Instruments and Synon Interface Bridge is designed to provide a bi-directional path between the Information Engineering Facility and Synon/2E products, available in the first quarter next year. It is a full life cycle development environment that supports Infomation Engineering Methodology and rapid application development and business systems integration. The Synon AD/Interface Release 2.0 is available now and enables CSP/AE400 users to generate native AS/400 applications to improve program performance and enables developers to migrate applications still running on mainframe CSP environments in less time than it would take to rewrite them. The Synon Gateway/3X-400 is a design recovery tool to enable AS/400 developers to re-engineer applications from native S/3X or AS/400 RPG or Cobol Environments into the Synon environment on AS/400, available in the first quarter of 1994.
