Veteran software testing and metrics specialist McCabe & Associates has finally weighed into the Year 2000 market, with a version of its McCabe Visual toolset designed for finding the structure and complexity of date usage in software – and not just in Cobol. McCabe Visual 2000 is able to provide a date-centric view into applications written in a total of nine programming languages – Cobol, C, C++, Visual Basic, Fortran, Ada, 370 Assembler, Pascal and Model 204. The product, though formally announced next week, has in fact been shipping in a production version since July; president and chief operating officer Phil Carrai, speaking from the 100-employee strong firm’s Columbia, Maryland HQ, says the time lag has been so that the company has been able to develop a number of strong user case studies to back up its claims, including Clorox and Nabisco.
By Gary Flood
McCabe, founded in 1977 and still run by Tom McCabe, Sr, who remains chairman and chief executive officer, has acquired a strong reputation technically, but has never exactly done a lot of marketing. It claims to have launched the first ever tool for analyzing software complexity in 1987, and also that it has been used by blue-chip corporates and Government agencies to test and re-engineer some 25 billion lines of code – but it has not made any radical changes to its product family since 1993. Despite this Carrai claims enviable profitability, with $2m net profit on last year’s $7m revenue. The company’s indifference to the hurly- burly of marketing and PR seems to have changed dramatically the past nine months or so, however. To achieve rapid growth the company has taken the radical step (for it) of forming a board of directors, which includes the legendary Defense Dept computer spokesman Paul Strassman, building an international presence in Europe, and receiving an undisclosed amount of venture capital money last December from New York based investment firm Spencer Trask Holdings, Inc. Carrai claims this money has been used to primarily fund the development of Visual 2000. Why enter the crowded Year 2000 market now? Carrai claims that while engineering and defense clients have welcomed the relative discipline of using McCabe-style products, the reception has been slower in what he labels the business community. But the Year 2000 issue has finally forced many of these organizations to confront the need for testing as part of a systematic overhaul of their IT garages. Carrai also claims that there is a growing realization that the Year 2000 problem is not just limited to Cobol by any means, with worried ripples beginning to emanate from the C++ community on compliance – People are starting to see that legacy is legacy, whatever the language. Plainly, then, McCabe hopes to achieve visibility and presence through the year 2000 issue it was unable – or uninterested – in acquiring before. Plus, the firm may have begun a slow move to IPO – when pressed on the future of the company Carrai was extremely insistent that McCabe is a private company and no more could be gleaned from him, with the impression in this reporter’s mind being that might change soon. The product, available on Sun Solaris 2.4, Windows NT and Windows 95, costs $50,000 and up per server.
