V3.co.uk

Digital outlines Year 2000 initiatives and pushes tools through channel

by Jonathan Lambeth in Dublin

0 Comments

Digital announced a number of Year 2000 initiatives this week as it prepares for an upsurge in conversion work on applications running on its operating systems.

Speaking at the launch at Digital's Y2K compentency centre in Dublin, Year 2000 practice manager Chris Deal said he believed many companies had been focused on tackling mainframe systems and were now coming round to addressing Year 2000 problems on other operating systems and applications.

"OpenVMS and Digital Unix are now Year 2000 ready and we are currently reviewing software products that are not current," he said.

No clear statement has yet been made on compliance for other Digital operating systems such as Ultrix - a forerunner of Digital Unix - or OpenVMS releases prior to version six. The operating systems for Digital's original systems range, the PDP-11 - such as RSX, RSTS and Vax-11 - are now owned by Mentec Computer Systems, which is handling their compliance.

Deal said that a number of Year 2000 analysis tools would be resold through the channel. For instance, Piercom 2000 was designed for detecting and automated remediation of date problems inside Cobol code on Digital systems. Accelr8 is an analysis tool for a wider range of languages.

Two other system scanning applications, System Health Check and Leon, would only be available to channel partners, not customers, for use on Year 2000 projects, he added.

Digital also said it planned to highlight various leasing options for storage products for companies requiring additional capacity while they dealt with Y2K issues.

Cliff Murphy, manager of the Dublin competency centre, said the company had been surprised by the lack of demand for the services of the centre since it began operation 18 months ago. It employs 25 people to help migrate European customer applications to compliant status.

However, he believes most customers have been dealing with mainframes first and are now starting to look at other systems. But he warned that, from early next year, there are likely to be many systems going down in companies that began work too late.

V3 Latest