Little by little, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is making its more interesting technologies available to non-European markets. The other day at Networld+InterOp 95 it began a campaign to push its Integrated Systems Management environment into the US market via its Bull HN Information Systems unit, where it currently has only half a dozen customers, compared with 400-odd in Europe. Integrated Systems Management is now up to version 3, and Bull has kicked off a partners programme with 27 companies either converting applications, integrating systems and third party software or marketing Integrated Systems Management, including Oracle Corp, 3Com Corp, Microsoft Corp, Tandem Computers Inc and Novell Inc. The vendors it has been lining up for the Systems Management software for some months, turn out to be Silicon Graphics Inc and Sequent Computer Systems Corp, in addition to Tandem. Integrated Systems Management is part of Bull’s Distributed Computing Model for managing networks of heterogeneous Un ix and personal computer systems over TCP/IP and International Standards Organisations protocols as well as Bull’s proprietary Distributed Systems Architecture communications framework, which runs on its GCOS mainframes and minis. Integrated Systems Management includes portions of the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment; and ISM application programming interfaces have been added to the Software Foundation’s environment. It comprises 46 management applications supported by a common data repository. Bull is aiming the product at Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and SunSoft Inc network management environments. Version 2.0 of Integrated Systems Management Security Services, now renamed AccessMaster, is now out under most Unixes, Windows NT and on IBM mainframes, and has single sign-on, filtered Windows screens, integrated user management, audit trails, Generic Security Services application programming interfaces and secure data exchange, according to Bull.
