In what appears to be a volte face, Candle Corp says it will no longer develop the Candle Technologies framework as a commercial product. Instead it is renaming its Omegamon line of products, based on the framework, the Candle Command Centre for Unix, MVS, CICSplex and Sysplex, with the Unix version being released next month, and will concentrate on out-of-the box systems management products. Candle says its own developers will continue to use Candle Technologies but adds that it took the decision to drop it from sale because customers did not appear to want it. Peter Marshall, European technical director, said There are a lot of frameworks out there, with a lot of promise, but we don’t see a lot of people building solid, scalable applications on them. Other problems customers have had, he says, have been a lack of richness in application programming interfaces, complexity and the generally proprietory nature of most frameworks. Nevertheless, Candle Technologies was touted as the company’s grand move from MVS to Unix and it has spent $60m over four years on it. Candle may still license its framework, but says it has no definite plans in this direction. As for Candle Command Centre, the products in this family have been designed as out-of-the-box systems management offerings. Candle says it renamed the Omegamon family because they were viewed by users as monitoring tools for systems specialists. Calling them Candle Command Centre was better branding and the name is deemed to give a clearer indication of what the product does. The Unix version had been called Omegamon for Unix and had been due to ship last quarter; it was delayed when the company changed tack over Candle Technologies and has had some functionality added. Command Centre for Unix is able to build automatic routines, the number of attributes has been raised to more than 100 from 60 and analysis capabilities have been enhanced. Marshall says the product has been turned from a passive monitor to an active one. The system administrator configures aspects of the system that need to be monitored as managed objects and it is through these that navigation and detailed analysis is achieved; an object can be opened up to reveal other factors affecting it. Candle says this is faster than drilling down. Coupled with Omegaview 2, Candle’s existing product designed to pull together disparate views of systems provide by performance monitors, it enables the user to integrate applications and see into other types of Command Centres. It comprises the object-oriented g raphical user interface and the server, which is the management hub and a set of system-specific intelligent monitoring agents. It runs on Windows NT, AIX or MVS hubs and under AIX, HP-UX and SunOS. Later this year Candle will launch Command & Control which will enable any terminal application to be opened. The Command Centres are designed to provide a single point at which to manage an enterprise, a point at which it is possible to detect problems and then navigate through applications using managed objects. Eventually, Candle plans to merge the different versions of Command Centres so different systems can be managed from a one point.
