Peter Junker, international vice-president of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Computer Corp of America held a press briefing last week where he stressed the software company’s commitment to IBM’s System Application Architecture, as well as launching a distributed applications tool called Horizon. This high level communications package is for the LU6.2 System Application Architecture environment,offering SNA support within MVS, VSE and the VM/370 arena.With Horizon, Computer Corp has taken the LU6.2 component from IBM and embedded it in its proprietary applications generation User Language.This enables it to be used by programmers without a knowledge of more complex languages, as well as offering a way of customising the LU6.2 facilities quickly for application development.Horizon does this by combining simple LU6.2 verbs within User Language so that a transparent and concise interface is established for developing distributed applications.Since the majority of Computer Corp’s clients tend to be large organisations with an international network such as, within the European side of the business, Marks & Spencer, and the Royal Navy, Horizon has been designed to let the user, via a series of symbolic network entities, define the network to the proprietary Model 204 database by replacing real network names with symbolic names.In this way names become meaningful to users rather than simply remaining network codes, which facilitates problem solving in a distributed environment. Horizon enables organisations to expand their capacity by integrating their own software systems so that if the system overloads they don’t need to upgrade their hardware.Instead they are simply routed to another machine in the network which has spare capacity.Along with this launch, the company also announced a repackaging of products under the name Advantage Series.Each of the products in this Series runs under all IBM operating systems, and Computer Corp claims that it will enable the company to bring very large, performance intensive applications on-line for customers in months instead of years.The main parts of the Series are the Model 204 Version 2 relational database, the User Language, the extended application development tools called Workshop/204, the end user query and report writer Imagine, and, naturally enough, the new SAA product Horizon. Fujitsu, Hitachi
To underline the company’s belief that System Application Architecture will happen, Junker said that Computer Corp will be making further relevant product announcements in the next few months.Obviously aware of the way in which competitors like Software AG have decommitted from IBM, Junker added that he thought the IBM market would be fragmented over the next five years by Japanese IBMulators from Fujitsu and Hitachi running those companies’ rewrites of IBM operating systems.In which case Computer Corp will implement its software on the Japanese hardware, as well as continue its relationship with IBM.Junker believes such a strategy is workable since IBM cannot lock his company out – Computer Corp supplies too many of IBM’s large Federal customers in the US.All in all the company seems very self assured as it completes its first year in operation as an employee-owned concern following the management buyout from the CrownTek unit of CrownX last year (CI No 1,006).For, despite the difficulties in the database management systems market, Junker expects the annual figures to reveal a good year when they are come out in the summer.
