New York City-based Magna Software Corp is planning to move its Magna X Cobol transaction processing application development environment up to release 2.1, the version it was showing off at UniForum this month. It will have the Transarc Corp Encina version generally available next month. The company is preparing a slew of other additions to Magna X and has a broad bunch of new industry relationships lined up. Currently Magna provides Cobol-based transaction processing application development across CICS, Tuxedo and Encina using its Cobol/English-language like Extended Programming Language, XPL. It is targeting other systems and says it has agreements all but wrapped up with Unisys Corp to extend Magna X on to Unisys’s A and 2200 series mainframe transaction processing environments. Unisys is already moving Magna X onto its U-series Unix boxes. Magna has got other proprietary systems in sight too, including IBM Corp’s IMS and Digital Equipment Corp’s VAXes. Tandem Computers Inc wants to put Magna X up on its massively parallel processing Himalayas under NonStop and on its Unix-based Integrity Fault Tolerant and NR lines. Magna plans to land the third major Unix transaction processing environment, AT&T Global Information Solutions’ Top End, in the summer, through an agreement with transaction processing implementation house Independence Technologies Inc, Fremont, California, with which Magna already has a deal for Tuxedo. Meantime, this week or next, Boston, Massachusetts-based Open Environment Inc will announce that it has chosen Magna to provide the server application generation component of its Encompass Distributed Computing Environment and TCP/IP-based application development environment. Open Environment may well change the Magna X name under the OEM agreement. Magna is set to add PowerBuilder and Oracle Co-operative Development Environment versions of its Wizard client environment to the Visual Basic system it already offers. Magna’s promised Solaris implementation is on the way. Magna claims its first major European success at an Austrian social security department in Vienna.
