Computer Associates International Inc says development and quality assurance testing of its next-generation CA-Unicenter TNG systems management environment has been completed around six months ahead of the schedule it set internally and that production versions will be generally available later this year rather than the beginning of ’97. Base price for TNG will be around 30% higher than the current CA-Unicenter release, which costs around $48,000 on HP servers, $7,200 on Pentium servers, $52,000 on an RS/6000 36T, $40,000 on a SparcServer 1000 and $66,000 on SparcCenter 2000 servers according to its $400 per power unit price at the entry-level. However, CA does not yet have a Unix version of TNG’s 3D Real World Interface console which is built upon virtual reality technology from Sense8 Corp, Mill Valley, California. A Unix version of the currently Windows NT-only workstation console environment will follow in some unspecified timeframe. TNG also includes the Jasmine version of Fujitsu Ltd’s nine year old ODB-II object database enhanced with CA’s availability and data integrity technology which is used as the TNG repository, and the AgentWorks SNMP manager, GUI and toolkits inherited from Legent Corp. CA says around half of its existing CA-Unicenter customers are on maintenance programs that will lead them onto TNG with some upgrade charges, a fifth of installed sites are described as leading edge users that will jump immediately. CA expects at least 5,000 licensees to move over in time, though others won’t want to pay the extra or to have to port their current applications across. Although CA has lined up a slew of backslappers for TNG, there is little detail on exactly which companies are actively developing products to it and where they are with them. CA maintains its once-fanfared relationship with Sun Microsystems Inc is still on track but the promised packaging of CA and Sun management products hasn’t yet materialized. CA says there are six third-party products now integrated with TNG and it claims there will be a dozen more by general availability. It believes 250 customers with proprietary management systems will have integrated their systems by that time and that it will have at least four of the big six integrators peddling TNG. CA says Gartner Group, which takes CA- Unicenter to task believing it is focused almost exclusively on large server sites, is totally biased against it.
