Italian Selesta Group SpA’s UK middleware systems company, OpenWare Ltd, West Byfleet, Surrey plans to establish itself in the continental European market and then move across the Atlantic. It hopes its two products, Space and Shadow/Direct, will help it to achieve this, and OpenWare is positioning them against IBM Corp’s MQ Series. Space was developed by the Italian Primeur Group for independent software vendors to add multisystem functionality to their applications, enabling them to exchange messages and files across networks. Applications use calls to read and write data to a system of queues maintained by a Queue manager component on each machine. Individual applications see only the queue. Network protocols, different data and file formats, and different system types are hidden from the user by the Space management system. The Queue Managers on each machine co-ordinate data delivery to the target system. On arrival at the destination queue, an application can read the data according to customised or automatic schedules. Receipts and acknowledgments are generated by Space to support transactional workloads and maintain integrity. The Queue Manager represents the kernel of the Space system and is identical on all the systems. The application programming interface to Space is the same across all systems. The Space system kernel makes low-level calls to three additional components that are coded specifically for each system implementation; the Operating System Interface, the Filing System Interface and the Transport Layer. Space is compliant with IBM’s MQ Series architecture and OpenWare boasts guaranteed delivery, checkpoint-restart, cross-system event scheduling, return receipt after successful data transfer, security, logical database viewing plus bundled client-server development tools. Unix, MVS, OS/400, Windows and others are supported.

Neon Systems

Shadow-Direct was developed by Neon Systems, Houston, Texas, which says it has worked closely with Microsoft Corp and DB2 labs. The product is aimed at organisations looking to provide transparent access to mainframe data from desktop applications. The Open Data Base Connectivity-based system enables desktop applications created with Visual Basic and PowerBuilder to access data retrieved from DB2 tables and IMS databases, VSAM files and other databases. Client applications control commit-rollback processes for their updates and provide direct access to the desktop over LU 6.2 or TCP/IP, it says.