As reported briefly (CI No 1,623), Boole & Babbage Inc, which has a joint development program with IBM Hursley, has acquired a suite of CICS and VSAM performance utilities from Quantum International Corp. Under the deal, the two major products that Boole & Babbage now own are Hiper-Cache, which finely tunes dataset performance for VSAM, SAM, IMS and CICS file processing, and XA-Relo, a CICS performance optimiser. Hiper-Cache and XA-Relo are have an installed user-base at 200 MVS sites. The products will be supported and sold in the US by Empact Software, a Boole & Babbage company in Conyers, Georgia, while Boole & Babbage Europe will distribute the product in Europe. Hiper-Cache is said toi trim hours off batch processing jobs and reduce CICS internal response time by as much as 40%. In on-line environments, Hiper-Cache supports both VSAM and IMS datasets, managing CICS buffer allocations dynamically. XA-Relo addresses CICS performance obstacles by eliminating the degrading effects of storage constraints, dynamic storage compressions, and program loader wait times, thereby enabling the user to customise and tune CICS resources to meet specific organisational requirements. With XA-Relo installed, CICS regions can process larger transaction volumes in quicker response times without any hardware upgrades.
