Walker Announces Enterprise Client/Server Applications For IBM System/390; Tamaris C/S is First Financial Application Suite To Exploit IBM's System/390 Parallel Servers

Business Wire, April 26, 1995

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 1995--Walker Interactive Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:WALK), a premier provider of business and financial applications software, today announced the availability of Tamaris C/S, the first enterprise client/server business and financial application suite optimized for IBM's System/390 Parallel Server environments. Delivered with a Windows-based graphical user interface, decision support capabilities and distributed application functionality, Tamaris C/S financial applications uniquely support organizations with business-critical, client/server requirements.

"With the addition of Tamaris C/S to the Walker Enterprise Series, Walker is offering customers a superior solution to the current `one size fits all' approach of many client/server vendors," said Darrell Trimble, vice president of worldwide marketing at Walker. "Tamaris C/S eliminates the need for large enterprises to speculate about scalability just to gain client/server benefits."

Tamaris C/S is an integrated suite of high-performance core business applications designed to meet the demanding requirements of large-scale enterprises moving to client/server. Tamaris C/S is optimized for new releases of IBM's CICS and DB2 that make it an effective solution for organizations that require the flexibility of client/server while retaining the scalability, reliability and manageability of MVS. Tamaris C/S applications include General Ledger, Fixed Assets, Project Cost Management, Accounts Payable, Purchase Order, Inventory Management and Credit and Accounts Receivable.

"Tamaris C/S provides a viable solution today for customers demanding the immediate benefits of client/server technology," added Trimble. "The high-end marketplace is asking for the reduced cost of computing and improved user productivity that client/server promises, but is wary of the consequences of revolutionary, disruptive change to mission-critical business processes. Tamaris C/S is the only proven scalable, evolutionary, non-intrusive path to client/server available today."

Several customers are currently testing and are preparing to install Tamaris C/S applications. "IBM's System 3/90 CMOS technology can give us the flexibility of parallel processing with the reliability and scalability of MVS," said Ron McEvoy, chief information officer and senior vice president of IS development at Fred Meyer, Inc., a Portland-based retail company that provides one-stop-shopping. "We are working closely with Walker to implement Tamaris C/S in the S/390 environment, and congratulate Walker for embracing this new technology."

Tamaris C/S is a subset of the Walker Enterprise Series, a family of business and financial applications and services designed to address a broad range of cross-organizational business needs. The Walker Enterprise Series includes Tamaris C/S, an enterprise server suite of applications, and Aptos, a complete family of open systems applications. The Walker Enterprise Series provides organizations with broad technology flexibility to support the diverse needs of departments, business units, divisions and corporate headquarters.

IBM System/390 Parallel Servers

The S/390 Parallel Servers utilize CMOS microprocessors to significantly reduce space and power requirements, hardware costs and operational complexity. To many high end customers, this represents an opportunity to dramatically reduce the overall cost of computing, while moving to a next generation technology. The S/390 provides a strong alternative for those organizations unable to implement other client/server computing platforms due to stringent availability requirements.

S/390 Parallel Servers participate in the S/390 Parallel Sysplex environment. S/390 Parallel Sysplex is the IBM environment that enables data sharing, workload distribution and continuous availability among multiple S/390 processors. Parallel Sysplex consists of two or more MVS/ESA images using a coupling facility to enable high-performance data sharing and dynamic workload management.

According to March 9, 1995 META Group report, S/390 MIPS demand has grown at mid `80s rates -- 35% in 1994, and a projected 30% in 1995 as a result of slower than anticipated Unix client/server application roll-outs.

"Walker's Tamaris C/S strategy is right on target with the direction we're seeing within the enterprise-wide client/server marketplace," said Carl Greiner, vice president and director of Enterprise Data Center Strategies at the META Group, a Stamford, Connecticut information technology market assessment and consulting firm. "The Tamaris C/S implementation strategy is bringing applications to market immediately, providing a business-critical enterprise client/server solution. The combination of Walker's Tamaris C/S applications and desktop extensions, with IBM's System/390 provides a complete and viable enterprise client/server offering."

Pricing and Availability

Tamaris C/S is currently available for MVS, CICS and DB2 environments. Pricing for Tamaris C/S follows IBM's measured usage license fees model for the Enterprise Server components, and a user-based license fee model for the client components. Additional pricing information is available upon request.