Bridgeware 2-week data store: no throwaway
August 31, 2011
Taurus Software is teaming up with Abtech and Quest Software on a new SystemBridger bundle. The package includes a non-3000 database server, stocked with a relational database and expertise needed to implement it within a 3000 installation. Bridgeware drives the heart of the solution, which can help create an operational data store in as little as two weeks, said Taurus president Cailean Sherman.
While the software has its uses in migrations, too — Ecometry uses it exclusively for all of their customer migrations — it also enables a staged migration. “It allows them some flexibility,” Sherman said. “Should someone want to straddle the fence and have some of their business on the 3000 and some elsewhere, we can keep these environments in sync.”
But the Bundle is aimed at the customer who has no immediate plan to leave the 3000 and wants Windows, or even Linux- and Unix-based analysis tools. The design is to let the 3000’s production maintain its current pace, even while customers are using the data for advanced business intelligence.
“It’s the biggest need we see, to get reports built in the open systems environments,” Sherman said. “It’s just so much faster to create analysis with those tools.”
Over time a BridgeWare user who’s got a Bundle can begin to start porting data to new applications on other systems. Data from the new applications can be bridged back to applications that remain working on the HP 3000. The technology can get deployed with minimal work from a homesteader’s IT staff.
Homesteaders of today who’ve held off of migration “maybe don’t have big programming staffs or IT departments," she said. "To make it easier, they’d be more likely to need to rely on a solution using experts outside their company.” The alternative is spending IT budget to bring staff members up to speed on replication and data store technologies.
Open systems administration, for a customer who needs those skills on the relational database server, is the part of the bundle handled by Abtech. Database administration training is also on the menu for the Bundle. Most of the 3000 customers reach for Windows as the deployment environment for this kind of data store system, because of the breadth of experience available to manage that software.
The SystemBridger Bundle is more than an interim solution to precede a migration. “It’s not throwaway,” Sherman said. Getting the data, in real time, onto another environment gives the investment another way to pay for itself, whenever that day comes when the 3000 apps make a transition.
Ongoing support is a potential beyond the first year of using SystemBridger, but it’s not required. Abtech’s Miles Fleming, who heads up that company’s services area, came to Abtech from Ecometry.
Taurus estimates that about 30 companies remain who are using the MPE version of Ecometry’s software, but these homesteaders won’t give them up. For this kind of prospect, Taurus offers the fully-decoded Ecometry database that’s been normalized for reporting. “They won’t have to do any work to figure out where data lives when they create their reports,” Sherman said.