All: Peritus ... See post #364 for background information on the VIAS user conference and disclaimers regarding these posts. This particular post will focus on Peritus and their involvement with the Y2K situation.
Unfortunately, I only had one day to attend the conference, so I missed the Peritus presentation. I did, however, participate in some water cooler talk, and I stopped by the Peritus booth and chatted. In no way should any of this be considered indepth analysis. More hearsay than anything else.
Peritus' Y2K solution looks quite complete. In many ways, it parallels Matridigm's, but uses different terminology and processes. The major steps are all the same, as would be expected for an all encompassing remediation tool. A nice GUI wrapped around functional processes to guide the user through the confusing mess of required activities. Peritus has licensed several vendors to participate in their "Powered by Peritus" program (what a name ... they've just GOT to get a new marketing campaign). Incidentally, "Peritus" is Latin for something that made sense at the time I heard it, but I can't remember what it is, and I can't read my notes that I scribbled while I was running to catch the Bridge 2000 presentation.
I can't vouch for the technology, because not many of the VIAS folks knew much about it, other than there was a marketing/technology handshake of some sort. For what it's worth, KEAne has licensed it (as well as the VIAS solution, by the way), and I respect the technology managers at KEA enough to know there must be something behind it. Many of the "operational" and "environmental" problems that exist with Matridigm will apply here, as well. I'll leave all those comments to the Matridigm post.
From a marketing perspective, I like the idea that Peritus provides "AutoEnhancer/2000" technology to companies who want to do their own Y2K fix. When the programmer shortage gets excruciatingly painful as we get closer to 12/31/99, there will still be a way for the late bloomers to get the job done (maybe).
The analysis & fix software works by initially "decompiling" source code into "PIL"s (Peritus Intermediate Language), which theoretically isolates the following work from any environmental ideosynchracies or language dependencies. That's a good concept that has been used successfully in the past in other language analysis products. The only problem with that is that if the tool doesn't do it right, the programmer doesn't have much chance of helping the tool along when it stumbles. Not a big problem, but a concern. After the whiz-bang technology does the date finds and analyzes, the fix is programmatically determined (I imagine it's rules based, but didn't track that info down) and applied to the original source code. It leaves the original source as much in its original state as it can. It identifies any changes it made, as any self respecting automated changer would do. Note that the corrections can include the windowing concept as well as expanding date fields to 4 digits, which in my experienced COBOL programmer's opinion is the correct way to do the Y2K fix. Matridigm's tool only supports windowing and their now downtrodden proprietary firstborn .... packed binary.
A nice touch is that Peritus' tool generates the Bridge and conversion programs that are necessary for those migratory issues when you just can't convert all the code and data all at once (which is just about every time).
Sorry, but that's all I can report for now. Nobody I could find seemed to know the limitations regarding versions of COBOL, operating system limitations, etc. I just didn't have the time to track down the right person to answer those techie type things. See the Matridigm post for other caveats regarding environmental gotchas that would pertain to both products.
I'd like to get my hands on a before and after source image to see how they do what they say then can do. Maybe Peritus will invite me to their lab?
Note that I dislike the name of their remediation service, Automate:2000. For those of you who have been following my posts around SI, you'll know that I detest the misuse and abuse of the term "automation". The lead in sentence of their brochure states that the "service is an automation-assisted renovation of application systems for century compliance". Well, that's better. At least "automation-assisted" doesn't sound like they claim to be "fully automated", like others I'm aware of.
For now, Peritus is innocent until proven guilty. Even though I'm a world class technical skeptic, I feel pretty good about this one. There were some level headed folks I talked with who were quite positive about it. The "pie-in-the-sky" marketing types were extremely positive, but I take their input with several grains of salt. For what it's worth, investing-wise, I'm looking forward to the Peritus IPO.
If you have any questions, please ask.
Regards,
TED |
