Data manipulation and program testing tools that are claimed to save MVS applications programmers between 20 and 90 minutes a day have been introduced into the UK by XA Systems Corp, a 40-employee Los Gatos, California-based subsidiary of Information Builders. Both products, Data-Xpert and IMS-Xpert, are similar to IBM’s ISPF but XA says that they offer greater functionality and flexibility for creating test data and sorting out corrupt data in production files than ISPF. Data-Xpert is described as a full-screen system for editing, browsing, extracting, reformatting and printing VSAM, ISAM, PDS or sequential files while IMS-Xpert is a similar batch system for use with IMS databases. The products, which take one to two hours to install, will be joined at the end of this month in the XA portfolio by Test-Xpert, a package to help analyse tests carried out on Cobol programs, and by a real-time version of IMS-Xpert. Data-Xpert costs UKP25,000 for a one-time licence or rents for UKP2,083 a month; IMS-Xpert is UKP15,000 or UKP1,250 per month.
