Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and the Cologne-based software house Progress Software GmbH have signed a letter of intent to provide AS/400 software houses with an exit into the Unix market. Software houses can either choose a migration path provided by Siemens Nixdorf using Newtonabbey, Northern Ireland-based Unibol Ltd’s Unibol/400, or they can develop a Unix offering with the help of Progress’s development environment Progress Provision. Either way, said Georg Kern, head of migration business development at Siemens Nixdorf, Progress has an offering it can market on both Unix and AS/400 systems. Progress need only maintain one source code for both systems. In short, the outcome is more software applications that run under Unix and which can be made available for customers making the switch from AS/400. There is a growing market for Unix software, Kern said, and it is the company’s aim to open this market to the many software houses that would like to develop offerings in this direction but need support to do so. He said that software houses should not stop producing software for the AS/400… but they should make use of the opportunity to develop Unix offerings parallel to this. Progress Software is a supplier of proprietary development languages. The co-operation between the companies can also result in an increase of the number of offerings that run on the RM family of systems, according to Kern. The move to enter the AS/400 market is an important strategy, he said, adding that he believes that many software houses are at a point in their development cycle where it makes business sense to develop offerings for Unix. The partnership with Progress can make this possible. Siemens Nixdorf also reports that its co-operation with Unibol has been succ essful, with the Unibol/400 software having won a reputation among AS/400 software houses as a replacement for proprietary System/36 systems due to the fact that the product enables AS/400 systems to be implemented for Unix on a one-to-one basis.
