Candle Corp celebrated its 20th birthday yesterday by acquiring a software services firm – Amsys North America Inc – and striking a licensing deal with Tivoli Systems Inc. The Santa Monica, California-based company also announced it’ll focus more on application architecture and design as well as its usual deployment stomping ground and unveiled new packaged software and services products, codenamed Cobra. The acquisition of Boston, Massachusetts-based software services house Amsys is intended to help Candle beef up its services offering via Amsys’ range of consulting, application development and deployment and project management services. Amsys is currently porting MQSeries to Tandem Computers Inc’s Himalaya MPP servers. The firm will presumably fall under recently appointed VP of global professional services Tony D’Errico, formerly of Sequent Computer Systems Inc. Candle has also taken on board Steve Craggs, formerly senior manager at IBM Corp’s MQSeries software group, as VP of the solutions for networked applications business unit, which Craggs expects to grow to almost 200 people by the end of the year. Craggs, who will be based in the UK, says Candle’s birthday wish is to assure users it’ll enable its middleware systems to communicate with third parties wherever possible. That initiative comes in two parts. First, Candle will announce more partnerships to link Command Center with other systems. The Tivoli deal allows Candle to license Tivoli’s application development environment tool-kits to integrate the TME10 framework into Candle Command Center products. Users will be able to share data between both companies’ system frameworks and interface Candle solutions with Tivoli-based modules from ISVs. Craggs says about 85% of its mainframe customers and 20% to 30% of its distributed users have both Candle and Tivoli systems. Candle says the first level of the agreement enables bi-directional capability, so that an event monitored by a Tivoli product will also be passable to Command Center. By the first half of 1997 it’ll have achieved framework to framework linkage so that any application in a Tivoli domain can be accessed with Command Center. Candle is also expected to announce a deal with Unison Software Inc to build an interface to its Maestro job scheduling, workload balancing and backup restoration software.The contract is expected to be officially announced in the fourth quarter and includes a provision for Candle to act as a reseller for Unison products. The second part of Candle’s initiative is to link Command Center to back office applications with a packaged software and services offering. For example, its new Connect-Notes package allows user to connect Lotus Notes with mainframe systems. Also available immediately is Candle’s Connect-Two package to help users link two applications. Candle will roll out other packages this fall to connect Internet applications with legacy software and connect SAP R3 with other applications. The packages will cost between $60,000 and $100,000.
