Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--NetManage Takes First Step Toward Consolidating Products

NetManage will soon consolidate its two major legacy connectivity product lines, according to a company initiative announced Monday. As part of its new Host Access Platform branding strategy, the development component of OnWeb, NetManage's host integration solution, will become more like RUMBA, the company's widely used, but aging, line of terminal emulation software for OS/400 and mainframe hosts. NetManage plans to ship a new release of OnWeb next month, which RUMBA customers should find familiar yet easier to use.

RUMBA was launched in 1988 and is one of the most popular terminal emulators in the OS/400 marketplace, along with offerings from IBM, Attachmate, and others. Before its acquisition of RUMBA from Wall Data in 2000, for $93 million, NetManage had begun development of OnWeb, a host integration solution that repackages midrange and mainframe business processes and makes the them available over the Internet to Windows or Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications. While there is a thin-client version of RUMBA that runs in a Web browser, OnWeb provides more advanced Internet capabilities, including auto GUI generation, development of composite applications that span multiple host types, and support for Web services protocols.

NetManage decided that a more thorough blending of its RUMBA and OnWeb technologies was needed after RUMBA customers reported some duplication of effort in moving to OnWeb. "Customers moved us in this direction," says Vijay Lal, director of product marketing. The customers said, "If we do something in one product, we want to be leverage that in the other product, so we don't have to start from scratch."

With OnWeb 7.0, which is due to ship in November, NetManage customers should be able to reuse much of the customization work they've done in RUMBA, as they step up to OnWeb. Specifically, OnWeb 7.0 will support the same set of mapping, connectivity, security, and navigation services currently offered in RUBMA, Lal says. "By virtue of that common infrastructure, customers will gain the capability to leverage their investment in RUMBA, to create something new in OnWeb."

The NetManage plan calls for RUMBA and OnWeb to eventually merge into a single brand (if not a single product), and that's why the company introduced its Host Access Platform strategy. "It might not be exciting to end users, but there's a reason why the two products have come together," Lal says. "We're trying to bridge the skill gap between the host developers and the Web developers, using the Host Access Platform."

In addition to delivering a set of common services in RUBMA and OnWeb, NetManage is hoping to spur OnWeb adoption by offering a complimentary version of the OnWeb Designer development tool to RUMBA users who upgrade to the next release of RUBMA, which should also ship in November. The complimentary toolset will let customers develop trial host integration solutions with OnWeb, but they will need to buy a runtime license from NetManage if they want to put those applications into production, Lal says.

OnWeb 7.0 will include other important enhancements, in addition to the common infrastructure shared with RUMBA. First, customers will no longer have to actually code in the OnWeb Designer with this release. Instead, developers will have the option to compose their OnWeb applications entirely within Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 integrated development environment, and to create the back-end connections to OS/400 servers or mainframes through wizards. There is no requirement to write code, Lal says; it can all be handled visually, using the mouse to drag-and-drop and point-and-click. NetManage is also working to develop a similar level of integration with the J2EE integrated development environments from IBM and BEA Systems next year.

Other OnWeb 7.0 enhancements will include support for non-host-type operating systems, including Web- and Windows-based applications. NetManage is also excited about the capability in OnWeb to control access to specific business processes. For example, this feature could be used to grant a group of users access to a summary of customer order information but not to the order details. NetManage considers this a competitive advantage, and the company will likely push the feature as it ramps up sales efforts within the healthcare industry, which is under pressure to strictly control access to patient data.

NetManage will formally announce OnWeb 7.0 on Thursday, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2003, being held in New Orleans. Pricing will be different from past releases, Lal says, but has not yet been set.