By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Middleware and database vendor CrossWorks Inc said this week that it has signed up midrange Unix powerhouse Santa Cruz Operation as a partner to push its tools to AS/400 independent software vendors in the Unix markets. Minneapolis, Minnesota-based CrossWorks’ rehosting environment, Cross400, works by enabling ISVs to reuse their AS/400 applications on Unix and NT servers without having to rewrite them especially for those platforms.
CrossWorks reckons that a large number of AS/400 ISVs are looking for an alternative to moving applications to Java to support Unix and NT-based servers and that is why it is taking on established market leader Unicomp, which has a well-regarded AS/400 application rehosting environment for Unix and NT servers called Unibol/400. John Moroz, vice president of sales and marketing at CrossWorks, says that there is definitely room for two players in this market. There are about 6,000 AS/400 ISVs out there, he says, and most of them do not support their applications on open systems or Windows NT platforms.
Cross400 works by taking a finished source RPG program that runs on an AS/400, converting the program to ASCII format (from IBM’s EBCDIC format) and recompiling the RPG program in the new environment for its specific processor architecture. The result is the rehosted applications think they are running on OS/400 and talking to its database and systems programs. It can even emulate the IBM style green screens if customers want that (although they can add Windows-standard GUIs too).
While Unibol/400 only supports Oracle 8i on Unix and NT and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 on Windows NT, CrossWorks has cast its Unix net a little wider and made Cross400 available on IBM’s AIX 4.3.3 and 4.3.2, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, HP-UX 11.0 and SCO OpenServer 5.0 and, with this new agreement, UnixWare 7.3. Cross400 has also been certified for Red Hat Linux 6.1, and Crossworks is working to make the product run on all the other Linux reseller platforms.
On the database front, the product currently supports Oracle 8i, SQL Server 7.0 and IBM’s DB2 6.1. It has also developed its own DB2-like clone database, which it throws in for free to ISV customers who don’t want to pay for Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. The company is considering support of the Informix database and may look at other databases and platforms in time.
Moroz says Cross400 costs around $25,000 for rehosting a suite of applications whereas he estimates Unicomp’s Unibol/400 offering is at least $100,000 or more. He says the lower price should go a long way to making CrossWorks an attractive option to AS/400 ISVs who want to jump on the Linux, Windows 2000, Pentium III and Itanium bandwagons as well as support their code on Unix platforms at the same time.
With the announcement of the SCO deal, CrossWorks has a strong partner in both the small and medium business turnkey application market (one that Unicomp has by and large ignored) and the UnixWare 7.0 support means that CrossWorks and its ISV partners can chase the high-end of the Unix server market too. In addition, CrossWorks will soon announce support for SCO’s Tarantella web-to-host middleware, which means AS/400 ISVs will be able to web-enable their applications as well as moving them to cheaper platforms than the AS/400.
Having got the SCO agreement in the bag, Moroz says CrossWorks is keen to sign up marketing alliances with other prominent midrange vendors. (Unibol has partnerships with Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.) IBM is at the top of the list, followed by Sun, HP, Microsoft and Red Hat. The company is also in the process of raising $5m in venture capital to fund its marketing and development plans.
CrossWorks claims to have completed a number of migrations in the past year and says it has beaten Unicomp the two times it’s come up against the vendor. Of the 6,000 AS/400 application vendors out there, about 4,000 are perfect candidates for its product, CrossWorks says. The aim is to get 25% of them to sign up by 2003, which could potentially amount to $25m in sales plus untold millions in software royalties.
The issue facing CrossWorks’ potential ISV customers is that although they don’t have to rewrite applications for NT and Unix, they will need to know how to support them. That doesn’t make Cross400 a bad choice, it just means that ISVs are not avoiding the difficulties of supporting customers on multiple platforms by using a rehosting environment.
The core AS/400 program compilers in Cross400 were developed back in the mid-1980s by a Minnesotan company called Emphasys. In the early 1990s, Emphasys hit financial problems and by 1996 the company changed its name again, this time to Pioneer Software Development, based in Minneapolis. Then, in September of this year, after many years of intense product development for the AS/400 platform, Pioneer changed its name to CrossWorks and launched the Cross400 environment. The company still sells the Emphasys products under the Cross36 brand name.
