Infinium inAbles Choice for Users of Customized Apps

by Alex Woodie

According to Jeff Wilgis, Infinium's technology and integration product manager, more than half of the company's installed base of 1,800 companies has customized their Infinium ERP applications. Letting customers modify their applications allows them to tailor software to their exact needs, but it often complicates matters when customers upgrade the application, especially if there are many modifications.

About 18 months ago, the Hyannis, Massachusetts, company started development on a new tool that its services division could use to separate the presentation layer from the business logic of customized applications, in order to reduce the complications that arise when the two are tied together, as is often the case with screen scrapers. The tool, which would eventually become inAbler, was used in a few dozen customer accounts to transform green-screen interfaces of customized applications into Web browser interfaces, Wilgis said.

Along the way, Infinium recognized that the demand for the tool and service was great enough to warrant releasing inAbler by itself, which it did in late March.

In the hands of a customer's IT department, inAbler allows users to unhook the green-screen component from an application and implement new browser-based screens prebuilt by Infinium. The tool does this by automatically "mining" the application for segments of RPG and DDS code that instructed the application to present data in the 5250 data stream through the OS/400 Workstation Manager and replacing them with Java servlets that are processed in batch mode by the Web application server. The tool uses XML to communicate with the Web application server.

"Basically, what we do is massage the RPG and DDS code so it's no longer dependent on Workstation Manager," Wilgis said.

inAbler uses IBM's WebSphere Application Server 3.5, which IBM includes, free of charge, with OS/400. Infinium is researching a possible free replacement Web application server that inAbler users could use if IBM discontinues the free WebSphere Application Server 3.5.

Since the last two versions of Infinium's software have included Web-deployment options out-of-the-box, inAbler will be familiar to users of older Infinium software, Wilgis said. Infinium has had an original- equipment-manufacturer relationship with Jacada to use its screen-rejuvenation software to give its applications GUI front-ends.

inAbler will be useful to companies that have heavily modified their applications, Wilgis said. Companies with fewer than 10 customizations could probably handle the testing and compatibility issues that arise without the use of a specialized tool such as inAbler.

inAbler provides a greater assurance that companies with customized applications will not encounter compatibility issues when upgrading to new releases of Infinium's applications. "It's a challenge for customers with custom code," Wilgis said. "Every time we come out with a new release, they have to test it to make sure it still runs…. They still have to check it and test it [after using inAbler]. We just give them the ability to easily move that custom code up a level."

Infinium says there are currently about a dozen beta sites that are in the process of using inAbler on their applications. The software is priced according to the size of the AS/400 or iSeries processor and the number of users; typical installations can expect to incur fees in the $10,000 to $100,000 range, according to Infinium.

In other Infinium news, the company announced last week that its stock has successfully weathered Nasdaq's "exception period" and has regained its full listing on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market. The exception period started in January, following Infinium's poor financial performance for most of 2001 and the corresponding drop in its stock valuation to under $1. The stock has since climbed steadily and was trading in the $4 range last week, boosting the company's market capitalization above $53 million and thus satisfying Nasdaq's market cap requirement. As a result, the company's ticker symbol has changed from INFMC back to INFM.