Tool suppliers are more prolific than rabbits on Viagra, so is it
time to dish out the bromide?
One of the biggest changes to the AS/400 market during the past
five years has been the number of tool suppliers rushing to port
their products into the world's second largest market. This is
something that IBM Rochester has been addressing for the past two
years. It believes that the latest hardware and operating system
releases show the way forward. . . or does it?
Big Blue has always been very good at selling hardware, but its
record with software is uneven at the best of times. Three key
players have gone public to say that they see no need to use any of
the extra tools currently available.
Malcolm Jones, founder and chairman of best-of-breed supplier JBS
Computer Services, said, "To date we have found little or no need
to use anything other than the utilities available with DB2 and the
AS/400's own internal database. These allow our sites to do almost
anything they need to do."
Major iSeries reseller JBA/Geac recommends its sites that they only
need the tools built into DB2 and SQL, while Philip Burchill,
development manager at leading AS/400 site QAS, admitted his firm
had no plans to progress beyond the native AS/400 database.
He added, "We haven't identified a need to use DB2 or any
associated tools. The native AS/400 database and data compression
techniques give us everything we want, including security. We have
found no problems with loading data to and from PCs."
IBM's strategy is to develop the 10% of medium to large sites which
generate 30% of Rochester's revenue. This has left many users
wondering whether Big Blue really knows what it is doing.
It is a badly kept secret that many AS/400 sites would love to see
IBM nuke Microsoft, rather than Oracle, and there is much anger
that Big Blue's missiles are pointed at Larry Ellison, rather than
Bill Gates.
IBM has produced some entry-level packages called Start Now. While
these could be better marketed, it does show Rochester's thinking.
Reading between the lines, Big Blue knows that while the large
sites will bring in lots of short term revenues, most real growth
will come from upgrading the 90% which are SMEs into the business
intelligence (BI) world.
Currently BI is perceived as only something for medium to large
sites with big cheque books. As the technology now exists to roll
it out to most SMEs, has IBM missed the point?
Garry Cleaver is technical sales director at Cirencester based Apex
Computers. He said, "We will shortly be working with IBM to
evaluate BI products. This is likely to include Business Objects
and Brio. Currently everything we do which is not infrastructure is
on Lotus Notes.
"The short term problem that IBM has is that in most SME sites
Microsoft is better known than DB2, even though we have shown there
is no problem importing data from multiple OS/400 and DB2
databases, and presenting it via Notes in the SME
environment.
"I think that Lpar (logical partitions) could help sell DB2 to
SMEs, as they can move everything onto a single box. Technology
like WebSphere will also help get DB2 and its associated tools into
more SMEs," Cleaver added.
So how does IBM see the AS/400 database market? Barry Thorn is Big
Blue's BI consultant for the iSeries. He said that a lot of work
had been done to make the AS/400 version of DB2 fully compliant
with the MVS version.
Thorn added, "The code bases will be different, because the two
machines have different architectures. There are also different
market drivers. The iSeries tend to be more shrink-wrapped. We know
that we have to support native file systems as well as SQL. OS/400
has got higher compliance rates with the Ansi SQL3 standard than
any other database on the market.
"This includes triggers and stored procedures even though, in the
iSeries world, sites expect DB2 to be hidden from users. We have to
win the hearts and minds of the developers and the followers of
fashion.
"Most sites have a healthy mix of legacy, Wintel and e-biz. They
want to integrate everything, rather than move everything onto the
same platform," he said.
Echoing this theme was Princeton Softech's sales manager Tony
Goodman. He said, "I expect to see more sites using data migration,
editing and relational data comparison features of our tools. We
support DB2 UDB, Oracle, Sybase, SQL, Windows NT, Informix, and
will shortly be supporting IMS, VSAM and sequential files.
"In the short term, I expect the trend for sites to move to Oracle
on their client-servers; but the pain will see many of them
migrating back to DB2.
"I also expect management to want better control over just what is
on their databases. Too often the only strategy is 'purge and
pray', with managers praying they purged the right bits of data.
The trend to thin client is making it impossible to maintain
databases in the traditional way on a production environment,
especially in the e-biz age.
"So we have released an archiving tool. This allows sites to search
and browse their archives without having to restore the data onto
the production database (for example, finding a transaction of five
years ago). Many sites asked us for this feature," Goodman
added.
Colin Armitage, managing director of The Original Software Co,
agrees that the growth of e-biz is creating demand for better
extraction and inquiry tools. He added, "We have just upgraded our
Extractor400 tool. This allows the creation of live database
subsets for specific project needs which can be logically
linked.
"Sites can also manipulate their data to check for duff entries,
and archive data more easily. This helps to keep production
databases thin, and minimise accidental input errors. It costs
£6,500 per CPU.
"Our Inquiry400 is free from our Web site. To date we have had over
300 downloads. This builds enquiries which use dynamic SQL for
testing prior to roll-out. For example, you could select 20 typical
customers from every city or county. The record chain HMV is
evaluating this for its 250 stores, each of which has an AS/400,"
Armitage said.
The latest entrant to the AS/400 world is Oracle specialists
Precise Software Solutions. Based in the heart of Cambridge
University, managing director Andy Knight said that his firm's
technology was being ported to run on DB2 UDB. This will run on the
AS/400 inside a Unix partition under the Lpar option.
Knight cut his teeth on developing tools which managed Oracle
databases via the backdoor. This means that few resources are
consumed. He added, "The DB2 version will have the same look and
feel as the Oracle version, the differences being in the
functionality of the two databases.
"More sites want to tune their databases because workloads are
growing and indexing strategies may change. Gone are the days when
you could hide the database internally. Most databases now have
external input.
"You may also want to know who are really your 20 biggest
customers, your 20 most common complaints, or which statements
consume the most resources. Precise/Indepth for DB2 UDB costs
between £3K and £30K, depending on processor size," Knight
concluded.
Boxtext: safestone
While all the techies are busy
playing with the latest toys, senior management urgently needs to
re-assess its security policies. Richard Eve, vice president Europe
at Safestone, warned, "The more you manipulate data and the further
you distribute it, the greater the need for good security on your
network.
"This is a business issue, not a bit of technology you add on as,
one, most Fortune 10,000 companies still have mission-critical
applications running on their AS/400s in their back offices, and
two, all those SMEs who use the AS/400 as their main platform have
forgotten how vulnerable they can be.
"Just because you think you control the official exit points won't
stop authorised users getting in and changing things," he
added.
Safestone partners with RSA Security Inc to offer SecurID for the
iSeries and works with Qs Software to offer integrated security for
J D Edwards' software. It recently rolled out secure Internet
banking for the Channel Islands arm of banker Kleinworth
Benson.
This was to ensure that the database was kept secure and client
confidentiality was intact. A side benefit was that the security
provided by Safestone Technologies now makes the AS/400 easier to
audit.