Tidal Software (650.493.4100) announced it entered a strategic partnership with Allegro Consultants for expanded development and support on the Sys*Admiral scheduling product for MPE/iX systems. Tidal president Terry Ewing said the relationship brings Allegro’s 3000 expertise — the company wrote the Hourglass 2000 Y2K utility as well as the SPLash SPL compiler for HP 3000s — to work on a new MPE agent for Sys*Admiral.

The agent will allow HP 3000 sites to schedule production JCLs within the MPE environment, according to Tidal Software officials. Allegro is working on capturing jobs out of the 3000 queues in another version of the agent. Jobs streamed outside of OCS Express are the target of the new agent.

“One of the key things we saw in the relationship was the chance to glean [Allegro’s] expertise, to provide all the features and functionality we need in that MPE agent,” Ewing said.

Tidal said that when that work is complete, it will be able to substitute Sys*Admiral for the Express product that’s already installed in the 3000 customer base.

Tidal’s Sys*Admiral solution offers a graphical interface for job scheduling, but it requires HP 3000 customers to put a Windows NT system in charge of scheduling in conjunction with the MPE agent software. Fault tolerance is built into the NT solution. Sys*Admiral’s master module starts at $15,000, and MPE agents are $6,000 to $8,000 based on tiers.

Ewing said Tidal received $3 million in venture capital in late 1998 and is moving toward capturing some of the Maestro installed-base business on HP 3000s.