Oakbrook Terrace, Ilinois-based Platinum Technology Inc reckons it has now either eaten or is still digesting 15 acquisitions since August 1994, but while it has been trying to get its after-dinner plans into order, thus far it appears to have only a very limited sense of direction. Data warehousing and systems management seem to be the order of the day, dressed up as Poems, the Platinum Open Enterprise Management System, but how all the various components from its acquisitions will come together remains something of a mystery. At the centre will be a data repository incorporating the merged technologies of RelTech Group Inc’s DBExcel and BrownStone Solutions Inc’s Data Dictionary/Solution. Platinum will be pushing DBExcel in favour of the BrownStone technology by dint of RelTech’s greater installed base until both are integrated in the fourth quarter, its says. Later it will offer BrownStone users a migration route up to the merged offering. Platinum president and chief executive Andrew Filopowski said one r eason it bought both repositories was simply to take technology that could be used by competitors out of the market. The idea is to enable systems management tools from its various shops – and third parties – to access data in a common repository. It says it does not plan to integrate the various tools and components at the application programming interface level, claiming that this is the kind of mistake companies like OpenVision Inc have made. A communications layer Platinum plans called Oasis will support Remote Procedure Calls and TCP/IP. It will develop its Trinzic Corp’s Forest & Trees desktop decision support system for more wide-ranging data warehouse use under the name Burton. Trinzic is already working on an object-based rule server and has an interface to Arbor Software Corp’s Essbase analysis server. Integration with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange is planned. An InfoBroker mechanism will connect disparate relational database architectures. Trinzic’s Deborah Gosling has been charged with bringing independent software vendors into the Platinum fold. The company claims Hewlett-Packard Co has already taken its report-writing technology, that Sun Microsystems Inc is after its job scheduler, and Digital Equipment Corp will take the whole kit and caboodle after it meets Platinum next month because DEC does not want to be in the systems management business any more. Filopowski aims to have between 20% and 30% of the company’s revenue coming from consultancy work; 85% of turnover is currently mainframe income, a figure he wants to get down to 50% next year. There are apparently no plans to re-house any of the acquisitions, even its 40 subsidiaries around the world. It has 11 development teams doing MVS, Unix, Windows and NT work. Acquisitions have cost Platinum $300m in paper; it turned over $120m last year and claims to have $80m in the bank.
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