Newcomer Adpac Software Ltd unveiled its range of IBM mainframe software productivity tools for the UK market at its launch in London the other day, (CI No 798), claiming that it would take the collective products from 10 companies to equal its Programming Machine/Standard Solutions, or PM/SS. No one product does all the jobs the PM/SS can, it proudly proclaimed. The PM/SS is a family of tools for the maintenance, documentation and analysis of Cobol, PL/I, certain Assem-bler source code and their related Job Control Languages. It is source-driven and can interface with all popular mainframe library management systems and data dictionaries. PM/SS – for use with IBM OS/MVS examines and documents current source libraries and compiles structured charts, diagrams or profiles for analysis. In this way a company can calculate how difficult it would be to implement a user’s suggested enhancement or the estimated maintenance costs of acquiring a software package. Adpac also reckons that PM/SS makes the job of rationalising code to be put on to a data dictionary easier. It says it can extract elements, sort through the ones that are no longer valid, select and merge them on to one list which is then automatically re-formatted into input streams such as Datamanager and Datacom. It also claims that PM/SS can be used to monitor the development of systems to ensure consistency. According to Adpac, many data processing departments within companies are spending 60% to 80% of their annual software budget on maintaining systems. PM/SS, it says, can reduce this to just 30% to 50%. Adpac’s move into the UK is part of a five-year busi-ness growth plan which executive vice president Lisa Thompson sees shooting the company from just over $1m a year to $21m in five years. Business outside the US is expected to account for 20% to 30% of turnover when the network is complete. The main international push began last year with agreements being made in Japan with Ashisuto and in Australia with Waterfield Co. Talks are cur-rently going on with companies in Scandinavia, Holland, Italy and South Korea to name and few and Ms Thompson expects further joint ventures to be set up in the next year. Adpac Software Ltd was set up in a joint venture between Adpac Corp of San Francisco and Information Builders (UK) Ltd, the UK subsidiary of Information Builders Inc. Adpac provided the products and Information Builders put up the sales force of four in a facility at Wembley, Middlesex. In return it gets royalties on all sales. The price for a one time PM/SS licence is UKP40,000 with an annual usage royalty of UKP6,000.
Content from our partners
