Despite excitement among certain Boole & Babbage executives in California regarding the technology that Avant Garde Computing offered the company in terms of extending its MainView systems management automation product to encompass DEC VAX/VMS (CI No 1,524), a degree of conservative restraint has prevailed. The company now says that it is developing an interface between Avant Garde’s Net/Command network manager and the MVS MainView system so that alerts from non-IBM systems will appear on the MainView focal point, but that is as far as it is prepared to go at present. Indeed, as pointed out before, Boole & Babbage would probably require a partner to help foot the huge investment required to be able to write to alien systems because even among Unix implementations there is no common set of commands to write to. Boole & Babbage vice-president of marketing Saverio Merlo explains that the company bought Avant-Garde Computing because customers now have networks that cannot be controlled from MVS. Boole & Babbage is planning to implement some command abilities in Net/Command that will be user customisable to suit users’ own particular networks. However, Merlo stressed that Boole & Babbage is not in the software engineering market and will not, for example, develop a CICS management application to run in the AIX environment. Not even when AIX appears on the ES/9000 mainframe? Not even should AIX become part of SystemView? Merlo was adamant that IBM will create interfaces to AIX that will enable products such as MainView to interact with it and, therefore, it was not Boole & Babbage’s place to pre-empt this by developing software specifically for AIX. In the UK, British Telecom is the largest distributor of Net/Command which it markets under the name WatchMan and British Telecom is also a major proponent and user of Unix. Might this not pose a conflict of interests over the future development of Net/Command? Merlo responded somewhat enigmatically that he saw this pboblem as an opportunity. – Katy Ring
