Markham, Ontario-based systems management firm Cybermation Inc believes the time is right to launch itself into the European market, and has duly opened a UK office as its ‘springboard into Europe.’ It has also just realized that its tried and tested product could help companies automate their Year 2000 testing, and is in the process of signing deals to embed the software in other vendors’ Year 2000 systems. The company’s flagship product is the ESP Enterprise Systems Platform, a family of products that provides enterprise-wide automation of business processes such as job scheduling and workload management, across virtually any mainframe and mid-range system. ESP enables an entire distributed system, including mainframe and client-server systems, to be managed from a single console. ESP sits on the mainframe, and only a very thin, intelligent agent is deployed on the distributed servers. The company boasts an impressive list of customers, including the Bank of Montreal, Hudson’s Bay Company and in the US, from where it currently gets more than 90% of its revenue, JC Penney, Nike Inc, United Parcel Service, Miller Brewing Co and Southwestern Bell Telephone among others. It claims to save customers real money due to the increases in efficiency and increased automation. JC Penney alone claims to have saved $11.5m in payroll savings in one year alone, and reckons it got a return on its investment in ESP in just four days. Executive vice president Tina Rogers says privately-owned Cybermation has seen phenomenal growth in the 1990’s, and believes the time is right now to tap the UK and European market. She says the problem of managing heterogeneous systems is not a new one, but the market is still immature. One reason for this, she believes, is that it has been very difficult for vendors of personal computer systems to gear up to get the skills to handle the mainframe part of the system, and equally it requires a different culture and set of skills for a mainframer to produce client-server technology. Cybermation, as much by luck as judgement, Rogers admits, developed its systems using object- oriented techniques and a distributed architecture, even before names had been given to these techniques, and it was therefore able to extend its product to multiple operating systems with no change to the basic architecture. The company realized a few months ago that its ESP test factory product would be perfect for automating Year 2000 testing, including base line tests, regression tests and data forwarding, regardless of what tools a company has actually used to fix or test its data. Rogers says the biggest time consumer in testing is re-starting failed tests, and even testing 1,000 applications with two base line, 5 regression and 7 data forward tests, which she says are small numbers, could result in three months work in re-runs. ESP test factory automates re-runs and therefore should eliminate all this time, she says. The product has not been modified for Year 2000 testing. It is established software which is simply suitable for this particular testing application, the company says. It would be equally suitable to test EMU changes. Given that most predictions now recognize that if they are lucky, many companies are only likely to have fixed their absolutely critical systems in time for the Year 2000 deadline, Cybermation reckons the opportunity for selling ESP for testing will span well beyond 2000, to at least 2003. The company is in the process of signing a deal with Coopers & Lybrand’s Concord Software, which will embed ESP test factory into its Year 2000 testing tools, and also with Dr Gene Amdahl’s Commercial Data Servers Inc, which will bundle ESP test factory with its IBM-compatible mainframes. Founded in 1982, Cybermation currently employs around 65 people, although it aims to have added another 20 people by the end of the year. It has offices in Toronto, West Virginia, Australia and now the UK, where it has taken on Michael Edgley-Pyshorn, a 25- year industry veteran with IBM Corp, Storage Technology Inc and Encore Computer Corp on his CV, to head up the UK operation.
