Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Unitech Speeds Up Cross-Platform Data Verification Software

OS/400 shops looking to resolve data inconsistencies may want to check out last month's product announcement from Unitech. The Naperville, Illinois, software vendor issued a faster and more-resilient version of its data synchronization software, ACR/XP, which enables a variety of computer platforms, including OS/400, mainframe, Unix, and Windows servers, to receive notification and to share the field- and file-level data errors automatically detected by Unitech's ACR/Plus software.

Unitech provides a range of "information integrity" products and services to help companies deal with the very real, and consistent, problem of data inconsistencies. Errors are bound to enter your transactional systems, databases, and reports at some point, the company says, but instead of manually checking for errors, Unitech provides solutions that will automatically detect them, and then take action to bring the situation to remediation.

One of the Unitech products that provide this kind of capability is ACR/Plus. This software is supported on a variety of platforms and includes sensors. One sensor detects errors in total file values from one production run to the next, or from application to application; another looks for data inconsistencies at the record-level within the file itself. After finding an inconsistency, ACR/Plus automatically notifies you of the error (via e-mail) or can even kick off pre-defined processes to correct it. It also generates reports of its activities.

ACR/XP is the network-based companion to ACR/Plus, which enables cross-platform sharing of the inconsistencies that ACR/Plus discovers. ACR/XP's role is to go to a remote ACR/Plus database and retrieve the history log of the error information, so that it can be used to fix, or "balance," the data on the local machine. ACR/XP can use either TCP/IP or IBM's WebSphere MQ (formerly MQSeries) and works in read-only mode, so that it can't modify data on the host. Once the data transfer is complete, ACR/XP can signal to the host platform that processing on the local machine is complete, which, Unitech says, cuts wait times and speeds processing. Like ACR/Plus, ACR/XP can kick off predefined processes, in addition to sending e-mails to notify managers of events.

The latest release of the product, ACR/XP 3.0, features increases in speed and performance for the data retrieval and synchronization components. Additionally, it features enhanced notification capabilities that provide the source of all data shared between platforms, Unitech says. Lastly, ACR/XP 3.0 features a built-in back-up controller that lets users take their main ACR/XP controller down for maintenance, without interrupting the flow of critical business processes, Unitech says.

Last summer, Unitech issued a 3.0 release of ACR/Plus, which featured enhancements for Windows, Unix, and mainframes. Among the new features was the capability to report on as many as 999 history cycles and to send reports as e-mail attachments on Windows NT. That release also eliminated the 2 GB input file size limit for running on Unix, and increased the size of the unit names for MVS to 8 bytes.

Many of Unitech's customers are banks and insurance companies, but it has customers in the telecommunications, manufacturing, distribution, and retail industries as well. The company claims to have served about 600 Fortune-ranked businesses, including 70 percent of the top-10 life insurance companies in the United States, 85 percent of the Fortune-500-ranked long distance carriers, and eight of the top-10 financial services companies worldwide.

However, there is no way to confirm Unitech's claims, because the company has a policy that prevents it from disclosing the names of its clients. Similarly, we don't know whether there are any OS/400 shops using ACR/Plus or ACR/XP. For more product information, go to www.unitechsys.com.