Newsletter June 2006

We not only have development machines, but independent machines for performing test installations under a range of operating system versions.

The majority of the equipment inherited from Cristal was of 1990's vintage, and unsuitable for current operating system releases.

For VMS systems we have added two faster VAX platforms running VMS 7.3. one of which is a Charon VAX emulation. These augment the existing Microvax 3100 and 4000 systems running 7.1.

For the Alpha VMS we have installed Alphaserver 400, Alphaserver 800, DS10 and PWS500au platforms alongside the previous turbochannel AXP 3000 systems running VMS versions 7.1.

These systems also run VMS 7.2, 7.3, 7.3-1, 7.3-2 and 8.2 for parallel testing on all currently used operating system releases.

New Hardware Qualification Laboratory

Since January, RapidGen Software has made significant investment setting up a new Hardware Qualification Laboratory. Here we not only develop new releases for machine architectures, but test that they install and function correctly on each operating system version.

On IBM PowerPC we have supplemented the 32-bit Powerstack running AIX 4 with a 64-bit RS6000 running AIX 5.1 and 5.2.

On HP Precision Architecture we have supplemented the 32-bit Model 712-60 running HP-UX 10.20 by the addition of a 64-bit 8500 running HP-UX 11.00 and 11.11.

We have added two additional 64-bit Sun UltraSparc systems running Solaris 9 and Solaris 10.

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Got Legacy? Four Fates Await Your Applications

Organizations have wasted untold millions on purported one-size-fits-all solutions to their legacy application issues: dump the mainframe; rip and replace; move it all to Unix; and, most recently, outsource it all. As they adopted these solutions, IT managers slashed application maintenance budgets to dangerous levels to fund these efforts. Despite those efforts, today, most organizations are no closer to a permanent solution than when COBOL was the predominant programming language and indexed file access methods were considered revolutionary technology. Several recent trends indicate that IT organizations are ready for a break with the past. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a viable "future state" target, and IT managers are now admitting that they will keep some legacy applications much longer. In combination, these two factors are driving vendors to offer complementary tools and services to enable application reuse, and they are heightening interest in application portfolio management (APM) tools to create application metrics and visibility into IT activity. The stars have finally aligned to enable knowledge-based application rationalization and modernization.

The full report can be found at Forrester Research:-

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,38097,00.html

New Hardware Qualification Laboratory (Cont)

All of Cristal's Pentium 133 and Pentium Pro systems have been retired, replaced by a variety of Pentium M, Celeron, Duron, Sempron and AMD-64 based systems running Windows versions from Windows 98SE and 2000 through XP to Server2003 and XP-64 along with various 32 bit and 64 bit RedHat, Suse and Fedora Linux releases.

In addition, an Itanium system is due for installation before July and will be used for HP-UX 11.23 and VMS 8.21.

We have also moved ahead in making release media. Until recently these were produced using an

New Release - New Features

At the end of May 2006 we released Genius Solution V2.4.29 for OpenVMS and Windows; as you will have noticed we have moved to using Installshield for the Windows release of Genius. During the life of V2.4.29 the same OpenVMS release will be also made available using Polycenter.

Corresponding releases for Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and AIX will be made available over the next few months, the major delays for these systems being that we are now using the native installers for each platform, such as RPM, each of which is different.

We do not intend to drop support for the VMSINSTAL installation, but all previous shell script based Unix & Linux installers and the Windows 3.1 based SETUP are now obsolete.

The most important change in V2.4.29, apart from the re-branding as RapidGen, is that this version can be installed on VMS 8.2. Note that previous versions installed on earlier versions of VMS can be upgraded to VMS 8.2 without problems, only new installation on VMS 8.2 fails.

Windows XP Profession x64 edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 edition are now supported in this new release.

Support for Spanish runtime environments has now joined the existing support for French. Both of these are now included as standard in the release kits. Vestigial support exists for German & Italian and both

of these will be fleshed out in a future release when customer demand is evident.

Support for unique naming of output files using COMUNQ (including using RSR$IDENT) has been extended to the PC output modules (RQREXCEL, RQRCOMMA, RQRDIF, RQRWK4 etc), which are now included as standard in the easyGenius release kit.

Itanium Support for Genius

As part of our commitment to the future of OpenVMS on new platforms, we have initiated a project to develop a version of Genius for the Itanium processor. This project is being led by Dr Jolyon Cox, and in contrast to two previous programmes cancelled by Cristal, is scheduled for completion by year end.

We recognise that there have been significant industry fears about the future of the Itanium platform and as a result, this implementation will

Incorporate a RapidGen virtual machine implementation, optimised for the execution of expertGenius statements. It will be capable of running on any 64 bit platform supporting C.

The RapidGen Virtual machine will be included in all future 64-bit Genius solution runtime environments, making the virtual machine code portable across architectures.The Itanium version will be also available for HP-UX 11.23 and Linux.

We have established a Hardware Qualification Laboratory and are in the process of developing a RapidGen virtual machine implementation to support the Itanium platform.

We believe we have made real progress on the customer relations front. All UK M&S contracts falling due since December have been renewed and we are working hard to show all our users that there is real value in retaining technical support. This will become even more significant as we move towards the inevitable migration off the Alpha platform.

Some of our overseas customers are still facing a barrage of abuse from the previous owner but we are confident that it will not be long before they are able to put this behind them and move ahead with RapidGen.

Looking ahead, there will be important decisions to be made about new hardware and integrating Genius applications with other operational systems and services. Our team is growing and we have skills that extend beyond Genius into web services, distributed and remote access systems. In the months to come we will be talking to all our users and exploring new ways to get more from Genius.

A word from MD Tony Damon

A lot can happen in six months if there is a will to move forward. And as you will read in this newsletter RapidGen Software has made significant progress in recovering the ground lost during the 'Cristal Era'. We have just distributed the first new release of Genius since 2003 incorporating support for unique file naming in PC output and a Spanish runtime environment.