Wedding software, service: deals tie software firms and business consultants - Field Report: Enterprise Systems

Software Magazine, Jan, 1994 by George Lawton

In recent months, several enterprise systems software companies have forged alliances that match technology providers with the skills of business consultants doing battle in the client/server trenches. Notable deals pair Andersen Consulting, Chicago, with New York City-based Applied Business Technology (ABT), and Price Waterhouse with Texas Instruments (TI). Others are in offing.

In the alliance between ABT and Andersen Consulting, Andersen will provide an underlying methodology via its Foundation for Cooperative Processing client/server development toolset. For its part, ABT will provide its Total Project Management system, which takes advantage of the Foundation methodology. Both companies will work to further integrate these product lines, and market both to their customers.

Christopher Murray, president of ABT, noted that both in his firm and Andersen provide something the other could acquire only at great expense of time and money. Andersen had realized that its project management component lagged behind others on the market. Upgrading their existing tools, or creating new ones from scratch, would have required considerable investment. "ABT's Total Project Management system replaces an Andersen-developed component of its application development suite."

"Our [project manager] was able to satisfy the needs of Andersen's product to meet the needs of their clients with a minimum of modification," said Murray. On the other side, Andersen has a 10- to 15-year investment in client/server enterprise-level technology, Murray pointed out.

For ABT, Andersen's underlying architecture means "I can now focus my creativity on project management," said Murray. "I do not have to focus on the underlying architecture."

He continued, "The driving force in the relationship has to be tied into the two business plans. We have had relationships in the past fail because a particular individual who had the vision left, and there was no underpining mechanism to keep it together." Murray expects products based on the alliance to emerge in 1994.

Jeff Coomer, director of systems development for sales and marketing at Black & Decker Corp. in Towson, Md., said the alliance may be on the right track. "Good project management is a combination of methods, tools and procedures," he said. "A lot of companies make the mistake [of assuming] that it is just a tool, and they go down in flames."

TRANSITION METHODS

Meanwhile, Texas Instruments, Plano, Texas, and Price Waterhouse, New York City, have agreed to work together to market, distrubute and support tools for transition engineering. Price Waterhouse will provide the underlying methodology; Texas Instruments will supply the tools. Both companies are heavily involved in the migration of mainframe-centric applications to distributed environments.

According to Ed Acly, director of software research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in Framingham Mass., "What they are trying to accomplish -- transition engineering embodied with professional services -- is a fairly natural relationship."

Working with Price Waterhouse, Texas Instruments has adapted its toolset to play a key role in the end-to-end reengineering of existing legacy systems. Price Waterhouse has developed Arrae, its repository-based software. Arrae analyzes and modifies existing system components that may be moving from solely mainframe environments.

Early products to emerge from the alliance are Arrae/CSA (Current Systems Analysis) and Arrae/CSM (Current Systems Modification). They are !oth designed to work with TI's Information Engineering Facility (IEF).

CSA scans an existent enterprise information system to determine how the millions of lines of Cobol in a company's facilities work. CSM acts as a doctor's scalped to pull out those parts of the information system that do not work. It then helps reengineer those that need to be upgraded.

Stephen Errico, a partner at Price Waterhouse, explained, "Our clients have been crying our for help in getting out of the mainframe delemma."

The two firms felt their clients literally dragged them in to this arena. call along we have had joint clients really pushing us, making us go beyond our limits," said Errico. "They were premier clients, not the kind that you can put off for a year or two. Both TI and Price Waterhouse have made significant investment. Without the clients driving the demand, it may have been more difficult."

For a company like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the alliance may play a key role in enabling its move to the client/server arena. Mike Blechar, manager of a development center in Jacksonville, Fla., said the medical care giant has some systems that may be as many as 15 years old. Over the years it became hard to determine what was active code and what was redundant. Blechar has used the TI tools to analyze his existing base of software.