Third Party Watch
by
Shawn M. Gordon
President of S.M. Gordon & Associates
10/92

Interesting things have been happening of late, perhaps your already aware of them, but I will tell you again. Fortunately for the customer base, Cognos and Tymlabs have come to an agreement about PDQ Quiz. Apparently they decided it was easier and cheaper to work together instead of against each other. This decision comes just in time in relationship to the Unison Tymlabs merger.

DISC corporation, makers of Omnidex and IMSAM, have decided to consolidate their offices. This means that the Northern California has been consolidated into the Colorado main office. This will probably help them keep a cleaner control over the company I would imagine.

Hillary Software, distributors of HP 3000 software, have picked up a new product from the UK called NightWatch. This is similar to Callback from Design and Watchman from Unison in that it can call your phone should problems arise on your HP 3000 or 9000. From what I understand it doesn’t have all the bell’s and whistle’s of the others, but it is supposed to cost less as well. This kind of lights out operations control seems to be getting more and more popular with all the personnel cutbacks everyone has had to make.

Now I have a little comment to make about Interex. Those of you that happened to peruse the August issue of InterexPress may have seen a little write up on a talk I gave at SCRUG back in May. It was chock full of quotes and observations about my talk. While the observations were worded favorably the quotes were almost completely wrong. I am rather embarrassed about how badly I was misquoted, it gives a wrong impression about my paper and my knowledge. I am a budding UNIX enthusiast and don’t claim to be any sort of UNIX guru, and I just want to say that UNIX wasn’t written as a lark and I don’t think that college people are powder heads. If you are interested in reading what the paper was actually on please refer to the July issue of Interact. I hope the Interex reporters learn to do a little better job of quoting in the future.

Writing Microsoft Windows applications that communicate with the HP 3000 is becoming a popular sport of late. The newest one I have seen is OPSession from Cygnet Software. This program gives your operations a really neat windows interface to all those redundant operations tasks. Control of spoolfiles that include all sorts of selection criteria, building user’s, groups and accounts just by clicking on options. A function for monitoring various functions on the 300 is also available. I will be reviewing this product shortly for Interact, hopefully it will make the November issue.

Also in the Windows environment is DB/Advisor from LeeTech. Now if anyone remembers, Bradmark for a short time was advertising DBGenral/SQL, well this product was actually LeeTech’s SQL management system. Apparently the two companies no longer have an agreement. In the mean time however LeeTech wrote a generic driver program for Windows that will supposedly manage just about any data base function for just about any data base. From what I can find out, the way it is coded it should be a piece of cake to have it run against just about any platforms data base. I hear that Adager and Bradmark at least, will be showing up at LeeTech headquarters the week of 8-10-92 to check it out. I am hoping to maybe do a review of it later in the year.

Well I tried to be first with this, but I was never able to get any information out of them. I am writing this at the end of July, and Bradmark has been dropping rumors about some HUGE announcement that doesn’t have to do with a new product. Supposedly they will be announcing it at Interex so we will all know what it was by the time this column hits the streets. Maybe next time they will clue me in in time to make a difference.

On the performance front it seems that Robelle Consulting, makers of Supertool, earlier this year released an upgrade that afforded sort times twice that being offered by HPSORT on MPE/iX 3.0. Now that they have a copy of 4.0 they found that HPSORT is almost as fast as their new sort. They are confident however that they can get their sort times back up to twice that of HPSORT by early next year.

Well I learned a lesson recently from a reaction that I got to my first column. I want it to be clear that I in no way represent any particular companies interest (except maybe mine) and in no way will be using this column to promote the interest of a particular company. The statement I made about an agreement between my company and Unison was either premature or inaccurate, depending on what happens, even if it does happen it doesn’t affect my impartiality. I can always find something bad or good to say about someone, and I would rather say something good. All I plan to do is report whatever information I can get my stubby little fingers on. Anything that looks questionable is due to my inexperience in writing a column for publication. Actually I am still a little surprised anyone is reading this, hahaha.

So until next month I am going to do my best to avoid getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.