Gateshead, Tyne & Wear-based Quality Software Products Plc, in a joint venture with IBM Corp, has launched its Universal OLAS financial management package for DB2/6000, IBM’s Unix database manager. The company’s chairman, Alan Mordain, said the venture meant OLAS was a truly ‘open’ product. It will migrate seamlessly from a mainframe under IBM’s MVS operating system, to a complete range of Unix hardware including Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG. This development is of major significance for IBM and non-IBM system users, because it transcends the hardware argument, he said. The company had waited until it was sure IBM was seriously investing in DB2/6000 and is now confident this is the case. It took only 97-man days to complete the implementation and the same source code is used throughout, proving, the companies claim, that the DB2 family is genuinely portable. It was also, said Mondain, justification of the company’s investment in developing its own Mul tiple Cross Platform Engineering software, which enables complete interoperability between different manufacturers’ systems. He said the big advantage for both developers and customers was that only one set of skills is required for both mainframe and Unix installations. OLAS for DB2/6000 is available now.
