Mainframe tools vendor Sapiens International NV of Tel Aviv, Israel is diving into the already crowded open systems market with Hewlett-Packard Co HP-UX Unix and IBM Corp AIX Unix and AS/400 platform support for its ObjectPool application development tool. The new product goes by the name of ObjectPool X-Platform. But like it or not, support for two Unixes and AS/400 doesn’t really spell cross-platform – or even X-Platform – in the open systems market these days. Sapiens does plan Windows NT support, which it hopes to have ready by the fourth quarter this year. But as for other Unixes, the company says that depends on market demand, but that there are no firm plans for this year. Sapiens claims the new product brings the company’s expertise in enabling developers to build very high-end, mission critical applications to the open systems arena. It also argues that its object architecture is way ahead of the competition, enabling developers to distribute objects and applications across heterogeneous servers, using a combination of artificial intelligence and rules-based methods. The company is targeting the new product at high-end online transaction processing-type application developers, and while it has traditionally been strong in the financial services market, says the new product should open up new markets. The company is also making changes to its distribution channels for the new tool , increasing its indirect sales force. ObjectPool originally appeared last July as a mainframe-only tool (CI No 2,967), and it took two years to convert the code from its original assembler language to C, and to make sure it would be able to offer the necessary technical support for the platforms. Like Synon Corp, it says the hard – and expensive – part of porting to new platforms is having the technical support and services to hand when a customer needs them, rather than the cost of the port itself.
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