Sapiens International of London EC1 launched Sapiens the other day, billing it as the first rule-based object-oriented application development system for IBM mainframes in the UK market. At present Sapiens International is an IBM Enabling Vendor within the AD/Cycle development programme, and claims Sapiens to be the only object-oriented application generator that exists as part of AD/Cycle – IBM’s ParcPlace Systems deal currently covers the RS/6000 only. The Sapiens product was developed as part of a research project by the Israeli Weitzman Institute in 1979, before object-oriented technology had a name – in Israel, anyway. Over the years it has slowly built up a user base and claims a 33% market share of the IBM mainframe application generator market in Israel. Worldwide its users include Credit Agricole, Mercedes Benz, Canadian Pacific Rail, Lufthansa, Deutsche Airbus and the UK operation of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. There are currently 120 installations of Sapiens across the world, but it has had a low profile because it was the progeny of a research community and had no strong marketing push. This all changed in 1989 when the data processing department of the Swiss Bank Corp bought the product and liked it so much that it asked the investment arm of the organisation to invest in the company – Swiss Bank invested UKP2m and has a 20% shareholding which it has the option to increase to 33.3%. The backing has enabled the company to launch the product publicly. At present all the research and development is carried out in Israel, but in 1991 some research and development will be done in Europe and next year will also see a push into the US market. Sapiens International is currently looking for further investment from computer companies and is saying very loudly that it is very friendly to IBM and wants to become a bigger part of AD/Cycle and SAA. The company has a turnover of UKP10m this year and expects to grow at a rate of 100% per year throughout the 1990s – by 1995 it expects to have an installed base of around 4,000. It has already started this growth for next year by signing a marketing agreement with Hoskyns Group Plc – Hoskyns’ IBM division will also adopt Sapiens as a strategic applications generator. Indeed, Tony Connor, the director responsible for that division, believes that Sapiens will be a major contender in the market place of the future, becoming a strategic product in the system building arena. So what exactly does Sapiens do that is so promising? Well, according to the director of marketing, Peter Barber, it is a complete application development and maintenance system for developers of IBM mainframe software competitive with Oracle and Nomad products. However, whereas other tools help to speed up the life cycle development approach, Sapiens reduces the life cycle to one step. It doesn’t use programs at all but is described as a shopping bag full of objects. It is built in 370 Assembler and each object is driven by a discrete transaction, so doesn’t generate code. Sapiens does, however, create programs with a 30% higher memory overhead than Cobol applications, but is easier to maintain. The idea is re-use rather than recreate. Anything that is built with Sapiens can be moved across the 370 range. For example, a programmer can develop in TSO and move the application across to CICS. Sapiens runs under MVS, VM and VSE and uses CICS, CMS, TSO or IMS/DC. The product works by the developer describing the system’s data and then Sapiens attaches rules to that data. The Sapiens knowledge-base resides on the mainframe and interfaces to the rules and facts. As soon as the application is described it can run.
Sapiens eliminates guru factor
Consequently, development can be described as a single step process. There doesn’t have to be a prototyping stage, the full application can run immediately. Furthermore, Sapiens produces programs that never have system abends. Barber says that the rules and data idea of programming conforms to the idea of encapsulation in object-oriented technology, since o
nce the data item is changed then it is changed for all screens and reports. This is because with Sapiens when a rule is added that capability will be inherited. This means that the cost of changing a program with Sapiens is much lower than it would be using traditional development systems. In fact the application developer need only get individual pieces of an application right and does not even have to know what the entire system looks like. The applications generated using Sapiens are self-documenting and the knowledge of the system or the guru factor resides inside the knowledge-base. The company is currently developing a co-operative processing version of Sapiens for the PS/2 due next February and is considering following this with a stand-alone workstation version. The Sapiens engine will also be converted to C and moved to other machines. A licence for Sapiens costs UKP220,000 for MVS processor group 40, UKP40,000 for a 9370. – Katy Ring
