Digital outlines year 2000 plans

Applications Vendor prepares to resell millennium analysis and conversion tools through the channel.

Digital announced a number of year 2000 initiatives this week as itersion tools through the channel. prepares for an upsurge in conversion work on applications running on its operating systems.

Speaking at the launch of Digital's millennium competency centre in Dublin, year 2000 practice manager Chris Deal said he believed many companies had been focused on tackling mainframe systems and were now coming round to addressing year 2000 problems on other operating systems and applications.

Deal said year 2000 analysis tools would be resold through the channel, two examples being Piercom 2000, designed for detection and automated remediation of date problems inside Cobol code on Digital systems, and Accelr8, an analysis tool for a wider range of languages.

'OpenVMS and Digital Unix are now year 2000 ready, and we are reviewing software products that are not current,' he said.

But no clear statement has been made on compliance for other Digital operating systems such as Ultrix - a forerunner of Digital Unix - or OpenVMS releases prior to version 6.

Two other system scanning applications, System Health Check and Leon, would only be available to channel partners, not customers, for use on year 2000 projects, he added.

Digital also said it planned to highlight various leasing options for storage products for companies requiring additional capacity while they dealt with year 2000 issues.

Cliff Murphy, manager of the Dublin competency centre, said the company had been surprised by the lack of demand for the centre's services since it began operation 18 months ago. It employs 25 people to help migrate European customer applications to compliant status.

However, he believes most customers dealing with mainframes first are now starting to look at other systems. But he warned that from early next year, there will be many systems going down in companies that began work too late.

Digital has put a freeze on many areas of spending to help meet its financial targets for the year ending in June. Items affected are hiring staff, travel, training and advertising. The company said the move was unconnected to its forthcoming acquisition by Compaq.