Attachmate Excited with Combination of Reflection and Windows 7

October 23, 2012 Alex Woodie

Attachmate yesterday unveiled Reflection 2011 R3, a new release of its terminal emulation suite for accessing IBM mainframe, IBM i, Unix, and Hewlett-Packard NonStop hosts. The new release is certified to run Windows 8, which will become available later this week. But Attachmate expects more customers to run the software on Windows 7, as businesses upgrade from Windows XP.

Windows 8 brings a spiffy new user experience that’s designed to work the same whether the user is running a PC, a tablet, or a phone. However, Windows 8 is not expected to be widely adopted in the enterprise for some time. That’s because many businesses that run Windows XP decided to pass on the bloated OS that is Windows Vista, and wait to make the leap to Windows 7, which proved to be a leaner and meaner OS.

With extended support for Windows XP SP3 set to end in April 2014, many businesses are starting to seriously think about their upgrade path from Windows XP, which debuted in September 2001. Windows XP held 67 percent of the PC OS market when Windows 7 was released in July 2009. Today, Windows 7 has 54 percent of the market, compared to 25 percent for Windows XP, and just 3 percent for Windows Vista, according to statistics kept by w3School.com.

One Attachmate customer making the leap from Windows XP is the wealth management firm Northern Trust. By adopting Attachmate Reflection 2011 R3 terminal emulators on new Windows 7 machines, the company is expected to generate “a significant aggregate increase in overall end-user productivity,” according to Catherine Casacchia, vice president of IT at Northern Trust.

Besides still being supported on those new Windows 7 machines, Reflection 2011 R3 brings several new features, including support for Attachmate’s Reflection Security Gateway, which adds a layer of security between client devices and hosts. This release also brings “additional refinements” to Attachmate’s “data hiding” features for IBM host screens.