IBM announced new partners for it's SystemView International Alliance, and gave out more details of the projected SystemView suite of products in it's announcements earlier this month.
These partners are Bachman Information Systems, Candle, Goal Systems, Platinum Technology and Information Retrieval Companies (IRC). Legent, another major software supplier with products in the SystemView area, has stated that it has declined to join the SystemView Alliance.
SystemView consists of a common user interface (the End-User Dimension), a data directory (the Data Dimension) and a suite of application programs (the Applications Dimension), all for system and network performance and operations information. The Applications Dimension covers change management, problem management, configuration management, performance management, operations management and business management. IBM's NetView network management product is the basis for SystemView. The End- User Dimension conforms to SAA, with the emphasis on using OS/2 to provide the user interface for SAA.
IBM already maintains a similar programme for AD/Cycle, called the International Alliance for AD/Cycle. This programme has been in place for almost four years, but despite some early interest shown by customers, it has not been adopted widely by the user community.
AD/Cycle is IBM strategy to speed application development by the introduction of data dictionary and CASE (Computer Aided Systems Design) techniques. According to Arthur Parher, Enterprise Systems Director for IBM UK, "AD/Cycle today takes products and makes it easier for them to work together, ultimately shortening application development lifecycle activities and improving the productivity of application developers everywhere".
In the mean time, new AD/Cycle products have been announced by Bachman, Intersolv, Knowledgeware, Micro Focus and Synon. Intersolv is a relatively new company, formed by the merger of two earlier AD/Cycle international Alliance members, Sage and Polytron. Each of these announcements extends support for new IBM products, as well as products from other members of the Alliance. "Today we're introducing products and strategies that will allow developers to become more productive than ever before by allowing more integration between tools", said Parher.