Back in late March, Legent Corp promised it would take a bold step into glue manufacturing – providing the cement to hold together client-server systems (CI No 2,136). Over the previous year it had been busily buying companies with the necessary adhesive properties in their lockers, and Legent’s acquisitive streak has continued this year. The result is XPE, its cross system environment announced last week, which the company boasts is the result of a three-year $50m investment consisting of internal development, alliances, technology licensing agreements and acquisitions. Legent’s approach has been to identify eight areas necessary to distributed systems management and then fill them, one way or another. The combined effect is a rather grandiose architecture designed to put Legent at the heart of controlling distributed systems. Anyway – you wanted to know why Legent was spending all that money? Now’s the time to find out:
Category one is Distribution Management, designed to transport data and distribute software programs quickly throughout the enterprise. At the moment it consists of two products: XCOM and Distribulink. The former fell into Legent’s lap when it acquired Spectrum Concepts in January 1992 (CI No 1,844). It is a file transfer package, built for unattended operations across multiple systems. Currently it supports around 20 different environments. Distribulink, by contrast is an in-house-developed package used to distribute applications, both shrink-wrapped and bespoke. However Legent says that, once again Spectrum Concepts proved instrumental in its development. Another acquisition working in the same area is Corporate Microsystems Inc snapped up in August (CI No 2,245), which is working to extend Legent’s software distribution capabilities to Unix and OS/2 source systems. Legent also intends to exploit Corporate’s existing Mlink offering, which handles file transfer across modem links between Windows personal computers, Macinoshes, Unix and IBM’s 4680 point of sale terminals.
When it comes to category two, User Administration, however, the cupboard is still bare. The company is building a server from scratch to enable organisations to determine which users are on the network and their security ratings for accessing machines, software and data. There are no details as to what form this security server will take, or when it will appear, but the company says it is using a combination of its existing products, including N-Vision for Windows and licensed technology such as Tivoli Systems Inc’s Tivoli Management Facility; Legent invested a substantial sum in Tivoli, last February (CI No 2,107).
Distribution, Back-up and Recovery products are also thin on the ground at the moment, but Legent reckons it has a set of tools in beta test and they are on schedule for delivery in December.
Software administration is the fourth category, with Legent promising tools to manage the software development lifecycle from development through production. This part of the jigsaw is currently filled by just one product; its own Endevor Workstation which deals with inventory management, change control, configuration management and so forth for workstation applications and mainframe applications, developed on the workstation. It’s currently limited to MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2, but Legent says it will offer HP-UX, AIX and SunOS versions sometime next year.
Last month’s acquisition of Networx Inc (CI No 2,242) gave Legent its entree to Network Problem Management thanks to Paradigm, a Unix-based trouble-ticketing, help-desk and inventory management application. The software, which is currently resold by the likes of Synoptics Communications Inc and Ungermann Bass Inc interfaces with Hewlett-Packard Co’s OpenView, IBM Corp’s NetView/6000 and SunNet Manager.
Capacity planning and performance, asset, and storage management are all lumped together by Legent’s into its Resource Management category. The company is using its in-house Paramount software, while leaning heavily on an alliance with Hewlett-Packard, signed in September. P
aramount is Legent’s performance management application that acts as central point of control, sucking information out of the databases of its other products. Under the agreement the two companies will jointly develop, market and sell performance and resource management tools. In practice this means that they will integrate the Paramount architecture with HP PerfView and some other of its Unix-based tools. Legent will begin selling these HP products early next year and says that in the second half it will launch integrated MVS/Unix Paramount applications under HP OpenView. It will also be using its MICS product family to provide enterprise-wide data capture.
Distributed Operations Management is the most nebulous of the company’s headings. Described as tools to respond to problems across different systems it revolves around Automate/XC, first introduced in 1988, which externally manages IBM, Digital Equipment Corp, and Tandem machines. The engine will run on Hewlett, Sun and AIX machines next year, the company says currently it runs under OS/2. The other element is OPS/MVS, another existing tools for automating IBM mainframe activities.
For the final category: Distributed Database Management, the company is relying on its September acquisition of Performance Technologies Inc (CI No 2,265), and its September alliance with Bridge Technology Inc. Performance’s ACE family includes tools for production of Oracle applications, while Bridge’s Bridge/Fastload products are designed for moving data from IBM DB2 databases to a client-server systems. Legent acknowledges that there are still holes when it comes to supporting other databases and is looking to fill them.
As if that weren’t enough, all this glue is bound together with yet more glue in the form of the XPE framework, which consists of middleware, programming interfaces and software development kits to reduce implementation and integration times. The middleware itself provides four services. For User Presentation Services Legent has gone to Visix Software Inc and is using its Galaxy front end; designed to make applications portable across a wide range of graphical user interfaces. Legent is using PeerLogic’s Pipes technology and its own XPE framework for Communication Services to let the Legent products interoperate across disparate machines. The whole load is object-oriented so its no surprise to find Object Services promised, with support for Tivoli’s technology – the idea being that user and other managed entities can be defined consistency across the systems. Finding where all of these objects are will require Directory Services, the final middleware component. As architectures go it all looks very impressive, but we have seen impressive architectures fall apart in the past. Still, Legent has got quite a few of the pieces already in place and is banking heavily on XPE as the strategy that will boost its profitability. – Chris Rose
