V3.co.uk

Y2K: Start up to come out with testing tool - only 11 months before D-Day

by John Geralds in Silicon Valley

0 Comments

Atlhough now only 11 months away from the start of the Millenium, Bigisoft believes it is still not too late to produce a testing, contingency planning and remediation tool for enterprises with Year 2000 (Y2K) problems.

The Texas based start-up has raised $3 million in venture capital funding and is less than 30 days away from launching Vertex 2000, which it will target at global organisations using IBM mainframes.

A company spokesman said: "BigiSoft's approach to the millennium bug is a unique testing capability that allows companies with aged data to do independent verification and validation of previously remediated systems."

He explained that the software fixed the problematic four digit year fields by compressing them into two positions without requiring users to make changes to Cobol application source code.

As a result, "millions of lines of code can be accurately remediated in days and weeks instead of months," he claimed.

Vertex 2000 installs its own object code onto the mainframe, but saves the original Cobol application code, so it can compare the two for year date instructions. When it finds discrepancies between them, it makes changes either automatically or by user prompt.

BigiSoft was set up by two industry veterans. Bob Bemer, who is known as the father of ASCII, came up with the socalled "Bigit Method". At 78, he has come out of retirement to become chief scientist at the start up. Ron Brittian, the firm?s chief executive, has had 35 years in the industry and cofounded Citrix Systems.

Brittian said: "It's never too late if you have the right solution," because, he claimed, while the lights will not go out on 1 January, 2000, they "will flicker in a few places."

BigiSoft has raised about $3 million in private equity financing to help develop its sales and marketing efforts and expects to add $1.5 million in future to aid the market entry of its product. The company is pursuing an indirect sales strategy and is in the process of signing up resellers and distributors, but hopes to have 30 employees by the end of the year.

V3 Latest