Paul Keister, Morino Associates UK general manager, is, perhaps, too honest for his own good. Despite the fact that Morino’s products compete with some of those of Candle Corp, if not directly then at least for their share of data processing departments’ shrinking budgets, Keister believes that IBM installations with a limited spend should invest in Omegamon. Candle tells you what’s happening now, we are for the long-term look. The we refers to MICS, Morino’s MVS performance management and capacity planning package. Morino claims that the product is designed to provide the solution to scarcity of staff, expense of products, and the overabundance of data and reports. Behind the hype, one finds a product written in SAS Institute’s SAS language that has the ability to produce reports and analyse statistics from a wide range of systems software, including IBM’s CICS, IMS, DB2, and Network Performance Analyser as well as third party offerings such as Cullinet’s IDMS and IDMS/R, Boole and Babbage’s IMS Management Facility, Graham Systems’ Mazdamon and Morino’s own real-time TSO monitor TSO/MON. Morino, in fact, now claims to be able to tailor MICS to almost any MVS configuration and to support any system monitoring and measurement demands. The company recently announced a new version of MICS which adds improved interactive performance and systems administration, enhanced information retrieval facilities, and panel-driven searching and referencing of MICS documentation to the capacity planning, performance measurement and improvement recommendation, problem tracking and management reporting and system accounting capabilities. MICS costs a minimum of UKP25,000 on an IBM 3083. That buys the central database, on to which other components are bolted, and two places on a five-day training course that the buyer is contractually obliged to take up. MICS has just over 800 users of whom 60 are in the UK, and 22 in Belgium. Together with TSO/MON and MVS/PAS, a bi-monthly tape that identifies which of IBM’s past Program Temporary Fixes – the monthly tape IBM sends its users – are required to install new PTFs, and which PTFs simply do not work at all, MICS helped to produce $3.1m profits on $16.2m turnover in the six months to December 31 1986. In Europe, Morino grew at around 30% in 1986, which, says honest Paul Keister, meant that its penetration of the MVS market actually dropped. He sees greater concentration on management and project services and is looking for ways of improving Morino’s product support in 1987.
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