Digital Equipment Corp and IBM Corp’s Transarc Corp unit last week unveiled the first fruits of their February alliance on transaction processing (CI No 2,358). From this month, DEC, will offer version 2.0 of its ACMSxp transaction processing monitor for its OSF/1 Alpha implementation. The ACMSxp is now built on Transarc’s Encina toolkit and Distributed Computing Environment structured file server. It does not include Encina’s recoverable queuing service or peer-to-peer communications. DEC plans implementations for Windows NT and OpenVMS and is promising an NT ACMSxp developers’ kit this year. ACMSxp 2.0 costs from $100 to $200 for client run-time licences and from $9,000 to $85,000 for the developer’s version. Meanwhile, and as planned, Transarc will offer a full implementation of its Encina transation processing Monitor on Alpha OSF/1, also from this month priced at $150 for run-time licences and between $800 and $2,400 for server software. Transarc’s promised Windows NT implementation is now slated for sometime this year. It says Windows NT has not taken off as fast as Microsoft Corp expected. DEC also has rights to sell Encina under OSF/1 but now that it is shifting its sales model from direct to indirect channels, says it has no current plans to offer the software itself. DEC’s third Encina-based transaction processing environment, CICS/6000 for OSF/1, has been implemented by IBM’s Hursley Laboratories in Hampshire here in the UK, and is currently in beta test. DEC will ship the software early this year. It does not currently plan to put its CICS/6000 implementation up under Windows NT. The Encina tool kit and structured file server are the same across all three products, but each has a different queuing mechanism and application programming interfaces. DEC’s other transaction processing products include Novell Inc’s Tuxedo monitor on OSF/1, for which it claims several users, VISystems Inc’s CICS-compatible VIS/TP monitor, and its own OpenVMS-based ACMS, Application Control & Management System, environment. Either a confusing array of technologies or a full product choice, depending on your point of view. DEC says it will continue to support ACMS indefinitely and claims 40% of ACMS sales are to new customers. Meanwhile, DEC plans a major upgrade to its Admire forms-based transaction processing tools shortly which, it says, will bring cross-system compatibility and client-server functionality to both ACMSxp and ACMS application developers. The company says that with the new release, developers will be able to create one logical application definition in Windows and generate versions for a range of transaction processing environments, also enabling users to move applications between ACMSxp and ACMS. It will include a Visual Basic transaction processing client that can work with both environments and Open Data Base Connectivity links. DEC is unphased about Microsoft’s rumoured Viper transaction processing environment for Windows NT, judging that if Viper is as gappy as Microsoft’s systems management software then there will be plenty of opportunity for DEC’s own transaction processing offerings.
