Mainframe tools vendor Sapiens International NV of Tel Aviv, Israel has launched what it believes is a viable option for enabling companies to cater for the forthcoming Economic and Monetary Union without changing their underlying applications. Sapiens unveiled its wrapping technology, which features its patent pending ‘Euro-Virtual-Machine’, enabling mainframe green screens to be simply edited to add fields catering for the euro. The Euro Virtual Machine enables the user to ‘toggle’ between th e euro and the base currency, so that for example a German user inputting payments received could enter euro payments in euros and other payments in deutsche marks. The virtual machine then converts between currencies. In the case of the UK, which will not be in the first round of EMU and will therefore not have a fixed exchange rate against the euro, the virtual machine will also reference a currency conversion table. It will also produce a full audit trail to show the varying currency convers ion rates. Reports can also be wrapped, so that they can be produced in either currency without changing the underlying source code. One of the biggest challenges facing companies needing to change systems for euro-compliance, is the ‘transition period’ laid down by the Maastricht Treaty, which came into law on May 2, and dictates that countries will have to have dual currency capability for the duration of the three-year transition period before full adoption of the euro in 2002. After this ti me, European systems will then convert back to single currency, or euro only systems. Sapiens believes its wrappering approach is a far quicker and less expensive approach to the problem, since there is no change to source code and therefore no testing required. Obviously, the company admits wrapping will not be the answer to all problems, and some parts of the underlying system will have to be either converted or re-engineered, but it believes there will be a significant number of applications in each company which will simply be able to be adapted in this way. The company says it offers ‘one-stop-shopping’ to customers, since it can provide wrapping code, data conversion and re-engineering, as well as project management.
