Candle Corp believes it has opened up a whole new market by releasing its first products for the AS/400 market. Candle Command Center for AS/400 is claimed to simplify the task of managing complex client-server set-ups, and includes a new component, Interflow manager, which provides advanced automation capabilities and which won’t appear on Unix, NT or MVS versions of the Candle product for another two or three months. Candle’s involvement with the AS/400 is complex: it originally wrote the Automation Center 400 product for IBM Corp’s exclusive use. But after a few years of slow sales, Candle re-acquired the rights to sell the product from IBM in a little-publicized deal, masterminded by the company’s current president and chief operating officer, Bob LaBant, former vice president and general manager of IBM’s AS/400 division. After an extensive re-write, the products were introduced somewhat prematurely, says Candle, at the beginning of the year in the US. Now the company is ready to roll-out the products worldwide, particularly in Europe, the largest installed base of AS/400s, where its first customer, Swedish roller bearings manufacturer SKF AB, is already using the product. Candle Command Center supports RISC and the older non- RISC AS/400 for its Monitoring Agent component, but only the RISC-based server for the central Management Server component. A graphical Management Workstation component for analyzing and managing the collected data runs on OS/2, Windows95 and NT workstations. The optional fourth component is the Interflow automation control manager. Prices vary with configuration. IBM itself is said to be signed up as a third party supplier of the new products from September, though it’s not clear if it will be any more successful than it was the first time around. Candle plans further AS/400 releases for the second half of the year, including an AS/400 monitoring and configuration agent for MQSeries messaging middleware, and an AS/400 port of the MQView installation, configuration and monitoring tool it recently acquired from Apertus Technology Inc (CI No 3,079).
