Faced with the problem that many customers have mainframes from both their product lines – NEC Corp’s are derived from Bull DPS 8000 and DPS 7000 licences – NEC and IBM Japan Ltd are jointly developing software that enables their mainframes to interoperate. The first software product to be sold by NEC is XCP**, eXtended Communication Platform, a communications package that links NEC Acos to IBM MVS mainframes. The software will be available from December for a monthly rental of $1,720. IBM Japan will offer from December DataTrade for NEC ACOS**-4/XVP, which links with DataTrade MVS/ESA, an Electronic Data Interchange program.
