SEA Launches OS/400 Messaging Utility at COMMON

Published: September 26, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Software Engineering of America announced the general availability of a new OS/400 messaging utility at the COMMON conference last week in Miami. In addition to the new absMessage solution, SEA had two other OS/400 products to talk about, which marks a three-fold improvement in product breadth from the conference last spring, when the established mainframe utility vendor and sales and marketing organization was in between relationships with developers.

It's been about a year since SEA and RevSoft, an Australian OS/400 tool developer, ended their short-lived agreement to develop and sell OS/400 utilities into the North American iSeries market. Following the break-up, SEA had very little to offer OS/400 customers, except a commitment to honor existing support agreements and a commitment to develop new OS/400 products.

SEA followed through on that commitment and went on to launch absCompress, a compression and encryption tool that was developed by SEA's business partner, Seneca Technology of New Jersey, and launched within the last year, according to Russell Zitron, SEA's vice president of technical services.

absCompress is a native OS/400 utility that enables iSeries shops to reduce their DASD usage while simultaneously protecting valuable data. The product supports the gZip compression standard, and works with a variety of OS/400 data and object types, including libraries, save files, native objects, IFS objects, IFS directories, and entire output queues or just selected spool files. For encryption, the product uses the AES algorithm, in either 192-bit or 256-bit strength.

This July, SEA doubled the size of its OS/400 product offering when it partnered with OS/400 security and antivirus tool developer Raz-Lee, which has offices in New York and Israel. The addition of iSecurity complemented SEA's existing absCompress offering, and also fits well into SEA's future OS/400 development plans, Zitron says.

Last week, after several months of beta testing, SEA announced the general availability of absMessage, the message management and escalation utility for OS/400 servers, which was also developed by Seneca Technology.

absMessage enables iSeries shops to automate the process of sorting through the hundreds or thousands of messages an iSeries system can generate on a given day. The product features a GUI console that color-codes the various messages, giving administrators the capability to gauge the general health of the system with a quick look at the screen.

absMessage includes a built-in e-mail client that is used to notify operators and administrators of errors or other important conditions, a process known as escalation. A component of the utility, called absResource, gives the product the capability to execute scripts or programs automatically in response to certain events, which makes the product a key element of maintaining service level agreements (SLA), SEA says.

The product can also be configured to execute different routines or scripts for the same message, which can come in handy for tailoring the product's response during non-business hours. It also includes calendar event processing, which changes how it responds based on the day of the month, as well as support for message monitoring and management during restricted state processing.

A mobile component is also included that allows users to receive messages and respond to them from a cell phone and other handheld wireless devices. The capability to execute commands on the OS/400 server remotely from a wireless device was a very popular user request, Zitron says.

SEA isn't done developing new OS/400 utilities--or rather, Seneca Technology, with whom SEA has an exclusive development deal, isn't done on the OS/400 platform. The company is currently working on a new job scheduler, which will likely be a cross-platform offering, Zitron says. The company is also kicking around the idea of developing an OS/400 backup utility, he says.

The plan calls for leveraging SEA's reputation in the mainframe world to build its iSeries business. "A lot of older customers know our company from our mainframe tools, and they like our products," Zitron says. "We see a lot of potential in the iSeries space."

absMessage is available now. Pricing information was not available as this newsletter went to press. For more information, visit www.seasoft.com.

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