Competitive Web-To-Mainframe Access Solutions Reinforce Insession's Vendor Independence.

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 23, 1998--

Positions Are Now Clear Between Seamless Coexistence of TransFuse and Platform Lock-In Strategy of Interoperability Add-ons

Announcements this month by IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. are major steps in clarifying and reinforcing the position of Insession Inc. and its TransFuse accessware for end-to-end enterprise systems that link Web applications to mainframe content.

Now that all of the choices are out in the open, information technology managers should have little trouble in differentiating solutions, according to Mark Phillips, chief technical officer at Insession, who is resident at the company's Campbell, Calif. laboratories.

TransFuse continues to be the only truly heterogeneous middleware tool for access to mainframe transaction processing monitors (TPM) and database content that is essential to giving real-time Web commerce a viable future. "Insession is the only company focused entirely on TPM access, and its solution is the only one that seamlessly crosses all platforms, operating systems and network boundaries," Phillips said.

TransFuse is noted for its support of leading TPMs (IBM CICS, IMS and MQ Series messaging, Tandem Pathway and BEA Tuxedo for Unix systems), distributed object models (DCOM and CORBA), object request brokers (Iona Technologies' ORBIX and Visigenics' Visibroker), server/gateway operating systems (IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX and Microsoft NT), and leading programming environments (C++, Visual Basic, Java, Delphi, PowerBuilder and CORBA IDL).

In contrast, Phillips' opinion is that IBM, BEA and Microsoft are using mainframe access as a promotion to sell their platform strategies. "Regardless of their efforts to offer compatibility with each other and independent industry standards, there is a core of proprietary technology in each case that limits the future choices of IT managers," he said.

Specifically, Phillips addressed IBM's CICS Transaction Server 390, BEA's Iceberg object transaction monitor and Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) for Windows NT.

IBM's CTS 1.3 serves to perpetuate the mainframe-centric, two-tier transaction processing model, he observed. "This is a host-intrusive approach that wraps Java components around COBOL programs," Phillips said. "While enterprises that support an end-to-end IBM solution will find this product useful, it is not responsive to the needs of a heterogenous network."

BEA's new Object Transaction Manager is a new version of the company's successful Tuxedo middleware suite updated to provide interfaces to CORBA and COM, according to early press reports. Phillips added that it is basically a Tuxedo-centric solution that is valuable only to users of the entire suite of products.

Microsoft has announced an initiative to provide CORBA interoperability for its Transaction Server equipped with its COM software. CORBA is a set of standards for using object management brokers as advanced by the Object Management Group, a non-profit industry consortium of vendors and end users. COM is an NT-centric set of standards for the same purpose. "This is another case of an 'open' solution that is platform dependent," Phillips said.

With three power vendors elevating the mission-critical nature of TPM access, Insession's business strategy has been validated, according to Chief Executive Officer Mark Hutchens. "The functionality and ease of integration of TransFuse has already been proven by strategic middleware partners which include Active Software, Inprise, NetDynamics and Netscape, as well as end users, but as a company we can now say we have a better access solution in most cases than IBM, Microsoft and BEA."

Proving that claim, however, is dependent in large part on the user's information technology mindset, he added. "We will have a tough time competing on an uneven playing field against IBM, Microsoft and BEA doctrines, but we have an intrinsic advantage with IT managers who are more interested in best-of-breed solutions that provide incomparable flexibility for decision makers who would like to see the doctrines coexist for economic reasons, if no other."

Coexistence is at the heart of Insession's strategy -- working with any middleware vendor and providing TPM interoperability to platform-centric vendors. "The new choices in web-to-mainframe interoperability are smart moves, but they are based on an underlying strategy of excluding or displacing competitive operating environments," Phillips said. "Their value proposition is to buy something new, rewrite or write new code and lock yourself into our way of doing things."

Insession's intent is to keep doing exactly what it has been doing on behalf of TransFuse for the past year -- advocating independence and providing solutions that can be implemented in a matter of hours with no additional equipment or programming.

About Insession

Insession, based in Boulder, develops, sells and supports software products in the enterprise application server and networking marketplace. It specializes in both distributed and large-scale computing environments, particularly those involved with Internet access to traditional mainframe computers.

The company provides software products that enable access, interoperability and integration of new technologies, such as those associated with the Internet, with existing systems and their content as represented by large IBM, Tandem and UNIX computers. Insession has strategic partnerships with a number of companies including Active Software, Inprise Corp. (formerly Borland), NetDynamics, Netscape, and Sybase. In addition, Insession is an OrbixWise partner of Iona and an Alliance partner of Tandem. Additional information about Insession can be obtained at http://www.insession.com.

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