News that may bring some relief to some systems managers: the bulk of IBM’s mainframes have been officially third-party certified as able to withstand the Year 2000 onslaught – at the system software level, at least. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the industry body making the most noise at the moment about the threat outside the analyst community, has bestowed its ITAA*2000 century date change certification mark on Big Blue’s S/390 Division, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Eleven discrete process areas deemed necessary to a successful Year 2000 conversion were covered in the evaluation, according to the Association. The Software Productivity Consortium, of Herndon, Virginia, is the body that actually performed the technical evaluation. Note that the S/390 product developed using the now certified processes and methods is OS/390 Release 2 and future releases only; for those with older revs, caution still seems advisable.
