It may come as a surprise to many to know that it is tradition and not IBM which is slowing down the integration of AIX into IBM’s Systems Application Architecture. Computerworld reports that Jack Clemmons, IBM’s manager of technical computer-aided software engineering solutions, claims that what separates the AD/Cycle and AIX development systems is: tradition – IS traditionally is mainframe-oriented, and the technical market traditionally is workstation and Unix oriented. But as these traditions start to blend, we will evolve the strategy on both sides. He added IBM’s overall strategy is to allow customers to move around and do commercial or technical work on both types of platforms. This would mean that developers could use either OS/2 or Unix on workstations to write applications that are meant to run on IBM mainframes. Until now the IBM strategy has only stretched to the building of bridges between the two markets using common languages, user interfaces and communications protocols. Indeed, just a few months ago Mike Saranga, assistant general manager of IBM’s Development Operation said that SAA and AIX will come closer but they will not converge on a single destination. This latest statement must be causing increasing consternation among IBM’s AS/400 camp – which already appears to be under siege from the RS/6000 (CI No 1,493) – since a cross system code generator for the AS/400 is so low on IBM’s list of priorities that it called in the Islington, London company Synon earlier this year to plug the gap with its Synon/2 product (CI No 1,412). However, IBM’s real commitment to open systems will be revealed when it has a repository for the RS/6000 – at present the IBM Repository Manager is tied exclusively to the mainframe host running on MVS.
