Texas Instruments Inc’s European software engineering tools subsidiary, JMA Information Engineering Ltd of Ashford, Middlesex, continues its transformation from a consultancy into a software products outfit. Following Texas’s acquisition of JMA, formerly James Martin Associates, in May, 1991 – after a two-year period of pre-merger alignment – the consultants split off. Now JMA has released an entry-level OS/2 version of the Information Engineering Facility integrated toolset designed for systems of up to 50,000 lines of Cobol code – at UKP8,500, a fraction of a typical IBM MVS DB2 implementation, and a product which is aimed at reducing some of the training and support headaches CASE usually generates and which consultants are supposed to take care of. The Information Engineering Facility software usually comes with a price tag of UKP200,000 for product and UKP250,000 for added consultancy, according to group managing director David Fairbairn. The Rapid Development Starter Kit, on the other hand, includes a tutorial, IEF’s analysis, design, construction and implementation modules generating Cobol or C on top of OS/2 Data Base Manager; with the appropriate bridging tool an application developed with the kit can be converted for IBM MVS or VM, Digital Equipment Corp VMS, Tandem Computers Inc Guardian or Unix environments. A sort of IEF Lite. JMA seems to be gunning for the sort of applications its target users usually build with proprietary languages such as Focus from Information Builders Inc, as well as trying to make CASE more palatable to a marketplace which doesn’t really want to be told it’s the latest productivity panacea. That doesn’t stop JMA letting you know that according to US consultant Capers-Jones, a good productivity rate is 19 Cobol function points per person a month while Coca Cola UK Ltd claims a rate of 44 per month using IEF as development tool.
