The UK distributor RCMS, (the management buy out of Dun & Bradstreet Computer Services UK), is introducing the new Vista family of Nomad products for the IBM and DEC VAX environments in the UK. Nomad has been around as a fourth generation language for 15 years, but has only been available in the UK since 1984 when it was owned by Dun & Bradstreet Computer Services. Two years ago, the Nomad products were taken over by Thomson SA which set up Must Software International to handle its marketing and US-based development. Since then Nomad has gone from strength to strength and in Must’s 1989 financial year produced a turnover equivalent to $27.8m. There are 800 IBM VM and MVS sites worldwide which have Nomad, and the Nomad User Group claims it has 300,000 end users. Recently, the company has seen Nomad take off on the VAX (with an installed base of 80) and on MS-DOS which now has an installed base of 3,500. In the UK users include Esso, the National Westminster Bank, the Bank of Scotland and B&Q. Nomad was originally developed for VM CMS and then a version was written for MVS TSO. More recently Nomad entered the world of MS-DOS, and of DEC’s VAX/VMS environment. Development work on Nomad software will now be focussed to address IBM and DEC proprietary hardware. Nomad tools are developed in the C language and support both IBM’s SAA and DEC’s NAS environments. The first new product launched within the Vista programme is PC Nomad 3.0, costing UKP1,000, which provides client-server support for the Sybase SQL Server and Gupta’s SQLbase. PC Nomad can also act as a client to remote IBM mainframes and DEC servers including DB2, SQL/DS, Teradata, Nomad and VAX Rdb as well as to OS/2. By the end of the year Must Software promises that there will be PC Nomad workstation connections to remote processors via an LU6.2 link, as well as static SQL support for DB2 in mainframe Nomad, and the current Common User Access-enabling windowed interface will be be enhanced to comply with the SAA CUA ’89 specifications. As for the future, Nomad Vista products will be developed to support OS/2 Database Manager, DB/400 and Oracle, and they will eventually run under OS/400 and Unix.
