Having ritually buried the dumb terminal – Dixieland band and all – at Regine’s night-club in New York, Management Science America Inc’s John Imlay was in London last week to unveil his company’s new BrightView line of co-op-erative processing products (CI No 1,061). Elevating MSA’s existing range of financial, personnel, materials management and manufacturing software packages to full IBM Systems Application Architecture-compliance status, Imlay characterised the BrightView announcement as the onset of an era of closer IBM-independent software vendor co-operation. At a corporate level, although clearly the subject and culmination of enormous financial and internal struggles, Imlay described BrightView as a strategic direction, insisting that the solutions business is the right place to be in the 1990s. The new family embraces all the colour and use-of-screen criteria pop-up panels, pull-down menus, help information displays and red messaging – specified by IBM for the Common User Access component. Product manager Doug Massingall also drew attention to BrightView’s keystroke sensitivity, and pointed to the high degree of workstation validity offered to the user with the inclusion of both data-value and field level help panels. Cross field and field level editing could now be conducted at the workstation, he continued, boosting user productivity and reducing the use of mainframe resources. Eventually, claims MSA, the bulk of the data currently stored on a host will be scattered between workstations, with valuable CPU cycles reserved specifically for database management and complex editing purposes. In addition, argued Imlay, MSA customers will benefit from being in line with that rascal IBM; Systems Application Architecture is not a fad, he concluded, but an integral part of the bright road ahead, where data processing sites are out and end users firmly in. BrightView offers new SAA-compliant implementations of all the company’s existing range of mainframe applications and they will be offered at a flat UKP20,000 per application in the UK.
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