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Technology Stocks : INFORMATION ANALYSIS (IAIC) - YEAR 2000 Date Remediation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (1523)	4/23/1998 4:38:00 PM
From: ThirdEye	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2011

49er: What we have here is twin imperatives going on. UPgrading systems to open environments has been and will continue to be one of them. But y2k, which shouldn't have been a surprise, takes precedence because of deadline and because if you upgrade your systems or migrate, ya need to be able to take all your old stuff with ya-and ya can't take all your old stuff if it isn't y2k complaint. IA has the tool to migrate and also wants to become an outsourcing company. So they are trying, as are many, to use y2k to leverage into the other. Matt can answer this question better than I, I'm sure. But I think that's the gist of it.

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (1523)	4/25/1998 9:06:00 AM
From: Matthew F. Kern	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 2011

ole49er: Concerning what happens after the year 2000 rush ends, this is a complex question and does not have a simple answer. The answer in a nutshell, which is obscure and vague, is that all the budget needed for IS upgrades is being used for Y2K, or should be. After Y2K there should be a mad rush for overdue upgrades. To talk about what gets upgraded in the world of MIS (Management Information Systems) you have to slow down and think about how big companies organize their data processing world. Small companies become a less capable less sophisticated bunch who wannabeee just like the big guys... MIS is organized, usually informally, into levels or 'tiers'. At the bottom of the heap is the machine on the desktop. Up from there is first the local network server, the departmental database machines, and then the mainframes. Each is more expensive than the last. The reason for the expense is often thought to have to do with how powerful the machine is in processing power, but that is not the full picture and misguides many. The deeper truth is that each tier is more and more secure, reliable and trustworthy. Imagine if Chase Manhatan lost all their account records. They would be out of business right? This justifies the expense of mainframes to keep such data, which if lost destroys the company. Mainframes have redundant hardware, full time administrators, 4 hour maintenance contracts etc. They just don't die. But mainframes as we know them are based on 1960's design in several ways.These old beasts are 32 bit in a world moving to 64 bits. They have old terminal like user interfaces and old 3gl software. What will happen to that key central data that must be protected at all costs? The Yankee Group and other high priced think tanks say that the data will still reside on big central boxes, but software will move to lower tiers. The big central boxes will become more modern as well perhaps. IBM has new, lower cost pre unit of processing mainframes with new versions of operating system. At one time more promising was the DEC ALPHA, and big machines based on DEC's 64 bit UNIX on the 64 bit ALPHA. A fully 64 bit version of ORACLE is available for DEC's 643 bit UNIX. This technology leaves IBM in the dust, and something like it may be the future of the mainframe role. But there is a pesky problem, software. These old applications are written in COBOL and other languages. They are written to use 'transaction monitors' that manage terminal screens. They need to be moved to new object-oriented-high-tech-high-buzzword environments to make the Yankee Group and their peers happy and keep the computer geeks like me employed. Otherwise the old language must reside on the old mainframe. The old language was written by the old mainframe vendor, or some partner. The old language for the software was proprietary, meaning it used vendor specific standards rather than national international or industry group sponsored standards. If the non company standards were used, the application could be recompiled on another vendor's hardware and life would be easier. The use of broader standards is 'open' and computer systems that use those standards are 'open systems'. These open systems have their problems. With no big central vendor acting as dictator they flounder in argument a bit. Too many cooks etc. Look at one of the most important near future standards (which may disappear or become key): CORBA. CORBA lets you write software that uses old mainframe applications as databases in the new object oriented world. It lets you write small parts of an application that can be reused and can jump from one machine to another. It is merging with JAVA to allow use on any arbitrary machine from DEC to HP to SUN to IBM. Unfortunately, CORBA cannot yet replace mainframe applications because no one has yet built a CORBA ORB system that is fault tolerent, allowing any machine running CORBA server objects to fail without affecting application logic. This is key because they want to use mostly small, unreliable machines. Some turkeys even want to use desktop machines, in complete denial of the fact that users turn them off, run over their power cords with the chair now and then, etc. Assuming real high reliability vendors and engineers with a view toward high reliability products fix CORBA, lots of mainframe COBOL may move to UNIX and NT boxes just after 2000. How? Maybe UNICAST. That is what CAST did before Y2K, take code in one computer language and 'rewrite' it in another. Even if not CORBA, that old code needs to move to newer versions of COBOL II, of course. Some will need to move to other environments like VB or Microfocus COBOL on PCs. Much of it must move to the web, JAVA or VBscript/Jscript. This could all be revenue for IAI in 2001 AD. People are making big money on web applications now, wait for this wave of changes! In summary, after 2000 the MIS budget used to fix Y2K will then be used to move applications off platforms that are no longer viable, and onto WEB enabled and other high-buzzword environments, in theory. .................Matt PS, before buying into this whole world, examine the revenues of companies that were doing translation before Y2K. Translation was not popular, and Y2K may change that. Also translating to the same old languages on mainframes does not look as promising as following the truly huge web trends, JAVA etc.