As we predicted last year, UniKix Technologies Inc is about to release its eponymous CICS on Unix transaction middleware for Windows NT (CI No 3,182), which it firmly believes is going to make it into the mission critical enterprise space as early as the year 2000. UniKix has been making its money to date encouraging people off IBM Corp mainframes and onto distributed Unix systems by promising the ability simply to recompile mainframe applications and run them on Unix without any code changes. The company firmly advocates evolution rather than revolution, and quotes industry analyst Standish Group’s Kaos report, which gives horror figures of failure rates for companies trying to re-write systems from scratch. Apparently the success rate for projects of more than $5m is zero, and only gets as good as 40% for projects of less than $500,000. The Phoenix, Arizona company has been benchmarking its Enterprise UniKix CICS transaction processing on NT, and says under stress from the 50 or 60 processes UniKix throws at an operating system and under endurance testing which simulates thousands of processes over many days, NT has held up extremely well. Aiden Harney, UniKix president, reckons NT is where Unix was about two to three years ago, and he firmly believes it will take its place as a de facto standard in the enterprise systems space, where combined with Intel Corp hardware its price/performance it will end up as much as 50 times cheaper than current mainframe offerings. The NT version of UniKix will install just like any other Windows application. As well as the Enterprise version, the company will also release its Distributed UniKix which is a lower cost server product for up to 16 users, and the UniKix Developer package. The NT version uses the same architecture as the Unix version, and includes among other features, CICS API compatibility, Micro Focus COBOL support, VSAM file management and relational DBMS support for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. The company’s pricing is the same for NT as Unix, which means it has no vested interest in which operating system prevails in the long term. The company’s main competition, says Harney, is from organizations staying with the mainframe, or those making large investments in package software from the likes of SAP AG, Baan NV or Oracle Corp. However, in these cases, UniKix finds it often picks up the bespoke parts of the system not catered for by the packages. UniKix does not see the likes of Bea Systems Inc’s Tuxedo as competition, because Tuxedo is aimed mainly at the completely new systems or complete re-write sector. Harney says the UniKix offering could kill the IBM mainframe argument dead, and in fact IBM banned the company from a recent show on the grounds it was too close a competitor. In tests on Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc hardware, UniKix claims to have exceeded mainframe MIPS, says that total cost of ownership is around a tenth of even the latest IBM CMOS systems, and claims its parallel batch processor reduced the time of a batch run from 6 hours on the mainframe to just 12 minutes on Unix. Enterprise UniKix for NT starts at $19,300, Distributed UniKix for 16 users is $9,600 and UniKix Developer costs $2,400 per single user.
