French PC-to-host middleware vendor Esker SA is launching its Corridor and Esker Plus in Europe. Once installed on a company’s web server, the products enable users of legacy databases to access them from their desktop computers via browsers. Bashrat Din, managing director of Esker’s UK operation, explained that Corridor is designed to provide web-to-host connectivity from dumb terminals for inter- and extranet applications, while Esker Plus is primarily for intranets. Esker Plus can connect to IBM mainframes, AS/400s or Unix servers, and has an ODBC driver to Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Informix and Progress databases. As for the end user environment, it supports Windows 3.11, ActiveX (Windows 95, 98 and NT), and Java Virtual Machine. Din described Corridor as ‘three-tier server-based gateway software’, which is bi-directional, translating data streams from companies’ character-based applications into HTML, enabling them to be presented ‘with a GUI look and feel’. Like Esker Plus, it is designed to be installed centrally, on a server, but used by various users, the company deploying it paying a license fee based on the number of concurrent users accessing it at one time. It has three levels of translation, from a default setting, which can be installed to start operating at once, through a ‘configured standard’ format to a fully customized one. Din identified what he termed a ‘race among PC-to-host vendors to develop and deliver’ web-to-host solutions right now, with the frontrunners being Attachmate (from a PC-to-mainframe background), Wall Data (PC-to-AS400), Reflections (PC-to-DEC or HP Unix) and Esker itself, coming from the PC-to-SCO Unix space. He added another entrant, OpenConnect, a provider of gateways from TCP/IP to IBM’s proprietary SNA environment, which is now also attacking the web-to-host market.
