Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

An English company that develops iSeries systems management software is building a network of service bureaus in the United States to provide OS/400 shops with automated hardware error management capabilities. For the last six months, NYCO has been in talks with prospective business partners--mostly larger OS/400 shops and third-party maintenance providers--that are interested in becoming hosts for server software that continually monitors customers' OS/400 servers and notifies them when a hardware problem arises.

Hardware error detection services have been around for years, with IBM's Service Director being the most prominent. However, there have been far fewer companies willing to make a go of building a business around hardware error detection than monitoring software and applications, which, on the OS/400 platform, are far more likely to be bug-ridden or to fail suddenly than the AS/400 and iSeries hardware (save for a bad batch or two of disks along the way).

But with industry giants like IBM and Hewlett-Packard driving home the message that servers should be self-managing and self-healing and should not bother the humans in the IT department, perhaps the market is ready to hand over certain jobs--like that of the night-shift operator who keeps watch over problem logs--to service providers, who, in turn, rely on specialized applications that sound an alarm if the lights begin to dim at their customers' sites.

That's the view taken by NYCO, a small but experienced company that has been in the OS/400 monitoring business for almost 15 years. The company, founded by Nigel Collis, provides an array of monitoring software, including its flagship product, Messenger/400, which provides message management, escalation, and delivery for software and application error messages. Since 1989, the company has delivered several other products that complement Messenger/400, including TEXTA/400, a mini Messenger/400 for monitoring a single queue; the System Status Monitor, for TCP/IP monitoring; and MINDER/2, an environmental monitoring system.

Several years ago, NYCO began working with British hardware maintenance services provider ITM Group to develop a new utility that would monitor the OS/400 hardware problem log, in much the same way that Messenger/400 monitored the application problem log. The result of that development effort was NEMS/400, and, today, ITM Group uses NEMS/400 to provide hardware problem monitoring and reporting for more than 200 OS/400 servers located across the United Kingdom.

NEMS/400 has two main components--the Problem Management Center and the Central Console--both of which are native OS/400 programs. The Problem Management Center is the data collection portion of NEMS/400, and it receives messages from OS/400 servers (OS/400 V4R5 or higher), on which the client portion, the Central Console, has been installed. When a monitored OS/400 server generates an entry on the hardware error queue, the Central Console forwards it to the Problem Management Center, which then automatically redirects the message--via e-mail, fax, or a Short Message Service (SMS) text message--to the desired recipient. The details in a problem message include the problem number, problem function, first level text, message ID, OS/400 message ID, date and time, machine serial number, and reference code.

An important feature of NEMS/400 is the built-in "heartbeat" monitor. Each monitored machine sends out a heartbeat at a specific interval to show it is alive and kicking. If, for whatever reason, a monitored machine fails to send out a heartbeat upon the specific interval, the Problem Management Center will alert the designated person to take action. The Problem Management Center also stories a complete history of individual machines and can be used to generate reports, for single machines or groups of them.

Since last October, two NYCO employees, Mark Sims and Doug Ramsey, have been working out of an office in Philadelphia to build a network of NEMS/400 service providers in the United States. The company's business model is to establish partnerships with a handful of large OS/400 shops and third-party maintenance providers in specific regions of the country, which will, in turn, provide NEMS/400 monitoring services to individual OS/400 shops. The business partners would run the Problem Management Center server software and would resell to its customers the Central Console licenses, which they buy in bulk from NYCO.

So far, NYCO has found amicable partners in Virginia, North Carolina, California, Wisconsin, and Texas. The company is close to signing contracts with some of these companies to get their NEMS/400 offering up and running later this year. To provide even coverage across the country, the company wants to establish additional partnerships in the Northwest, the Upper Midwest, and New England. However, NYCO does not want too many partners with overlapping districts, as it could start a price war. NYCO expects to sell Central Console licenses to its business partners for about $5 to $10 each, although the partners will most certainly mark up that price.