Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

OS/400 Edition
Volume 2, Number 23 -- June 18, 2002

SEAGULL Shifts Product Strategy with New LegaSuite

by Alex Woodie

When you have multiple software products that address the same basic problem, how do you differentiate them for maximum market effectiveness? If you're SEAGULL, you don't. At least not anymore. The Dutch provider of software for extending OS/400 and mainframe systems last week announced it is combining its emulation, Web-to-host, and application integration products into a single suite of tools, called the LegaSuite, that will allow users to do "almost anything they want" with their legacy systems.

Today's OS/400 and mainframe shops are challenged to augment their core computer systems with a number of technologies, including Windows and Web GUIs, wireless interfaces, enterprise application integration, business process integration (BPI), and Web services extensions, says Andre den Haan, SEAGULL's vice president of product strategy.

"We think a refreshing approach will be to take the legacy applications you already have, as a solid basis to reach out to the domains that typically surround legacy systems… to allow you to do almost anything you can think of, to extend" your legacy system, den Haan says. "We think we have a unique offering. We're the first one to really come out with a suite that has such broad scope."

To that end, SEAGULL is combining four of its key product lines and three third-party products it sells through recently established OEM deals, into the LegaSuite. These tools include the following:

BlueZone 5250 and 3270 emulation products (obtained in the Renex acquisition)
The two screen rejuvenation solutions, JWalk for 5250 iSeries applications and WinJa for 3270 zSeries applications
The Transidiom integration environment, for developing callable XML, COM, Java, SOAP, and WebSphere MQ components from legacy business logic
GoXML Transform, for mapping Transidiom input and output to the hundreds of different XML formats (sold by SEAGULL through its March 2002 OEM agreement with XML Global Technologies)
Metaserver BPI and runtime server, for complex distributed applications (sold by SEAGULL through its March 2002 OEM agreement with Metaserver)
Hostbridge, for replacing the 3270 data stream with XML for CICS applications (sold by SEAGULL through its April 2002 OEM agreement with HostBridge Technology)

While software development went into developing the LegaSuite--such as enabling the Metaserver BPI environment to recognize components generated by Transidiom, and allowing JWalk applications to invoke Web services through Transidiom--the move to create LegaSuite is as much about marketing and product positioning as it is about new technology. "Rather than go to market with a set of point tools, it [establishing LegaSuite] makes it a lot easier for the less initiated to explain what SEAGULL does," den Haan says.

Customers will not have to purchase the entire LegaSuite of tools. For instance, if transforming a 5250 order-entry screen into a Windows client is all that’s required, a single JWalk development license can be purchased. But by creating an umbrella brand to bring all of the key legacy extension products into a single, integrated platform, SEAGULL hopes to more effectively communicate that the value of its software is tapping the data and business logic assets housed in proprietary operating systems and exposing them to technology based on open standards.

Platform independence is one of the hallmarks of LegaSuite. Earlier this year, SEAGULL announced that Transidiom, WinJa, and JWalk will be able to run on Linux servers, which bolstered existing support for running the server portions of those products on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows platforms. But SEAGULL's claims to platform independence get a bigger boost by incorporating the technology from Metaserver into LegaSuite. Metaserver, which is based on supercomputing research done at Yale University and refined by Scientific Computing Associates for the Department of Defense, allows users to assemble business processes that exist on a wide range of different operating systems and restructure them and run them in a distributed, n-tier environment spanning many different systems. With Metaserver getting closer ties to SEAGULL's in-house technologies, the company can rightly say that its LegaSuite software is based on open systems and supports applications developed on IBM's WebSphere, BEA Systems' WebLogic, and Oracle's 9i Web application servers.

While Metaserver's advanced technology may be overkill for the thousands of smaller OS/400 shops, the hub of the new LegaSuite--at least for existing JWalk customers looking to move to the next stage of what SEAGULL calls the "legacy evolution continuum"--is shaping up to be Transidiom, which supports both the Microsoft .NET and Java Web services architectures. In any event, one of the side benefits of LegaSuite is that it opens the possibilities for migrating OS/400 and OS/390 workloads to new platforms, den Haan says. "Many of our customers have lingering desires to eventually migrate off legacy systems or architectures," he says. "One of the cornerstones [of LegaSuite] is that it allows them to use what they have now, but also allows them to structure a new system in such a way as to move to new architectures, to new types of implementations, to fully leverage new technology and new methods."

LegaSuite will undergo further refinement this summer. Although declining to discuss the specifics of yet-to-be announced technology, den Haan alludes to a research and development project currently underway that will provide capabilities similar to the Hostbridge for CICS environment, but for OS/400 environments. As such, the product would replace calls for the 5250 data stream with XML calls. Keep reading this newsletter for more information about this product when SEAGULL announces it.