Eager to scramble aboard the Systems Application Software bandwagon, a number of software companies are now beginning to present the world with SAA-compliant packages. In many ways, this term-ban-dying is misleading, for at this stage, compliance applies to just one third of the SAA components defined by IBM. Although the company has now set out some 600 specifications for developers to adhere to within the Common User Access, it has yet to define workable standards within either the Common Communications or Common Programming interfaces. Consequently, the fundamental portability principle of SAA – the capacity to move applications from machine to machine without rewriting code – will elude users for at least the next two to three years. Or so says Management Science America Inc, which has just announced BrightView (CI No 1,061), the first of a planned range of application suites designed to fulfill chairman John Imlay’s launch-pad promise to make the company’s range of financial, personnel, materials management and manufacturing software packages SAA-compliant. MSA small print does concede that, to date, products launched under the Brightview banner are fully Common User Access or CUA compliant. To this end, the new family embraces all the colour and use-of-screen criteria – pop-up panels, pull-down menus, help information displays and red messaging – specified by IBM for the Common User Access, and includes both data-value and field level help panels. But until IBM produces both the elusive DB2 Repository and finalises specifications for the two other key SAA components, the software’s progression towards full SAA-compliant status is sorely hindered. MSA’s Ed Holt claims that in two to three year’s time, BrightView’s mainframe host code will run equally happily on the AS/400 and the System/370. In the meantime, MSA plans the delivery of Common User Access-compliant applications for the System/370 by the end of March 1989, and similar offerings for the AS/400 by June. The portability issue also reared its ugly head at a recent International Business Communications-sponsored conference chaired by Martin Healey. Although welcoming the idea of SAA at a conceptual level, Healey pointed out that users of old, in-housedeveloped applications typically banks – would be unable to toe the SAA line through IBM’s failure to provide IMS, CICS, and PC-DOS interfaces. MSA denies that this has any bearing on its customers, who are protected through the constant maintenance and automatic upgrading of applications. As an example, it cites the new, January-planned release of its General Ledger package, arguing that this will be the version that BrightView will work with. Meanwhile, however, users should remember that SAA-compliant is still a long way from being synonymous with portability. Sophie Hanscombe
