Autobahn 2 gives app-on-tap new Web face

Telenomics e-services application for Web gets rapid client using Speedware tool

Internet time moves faster than regular development, which made HP eager to steer its first HP 3000 e-services partner onto a quick path to a Web client for its MPE application. That’s how Speedware’s Professional Services group got the assignment to develop a Web client interface for PWARE in less than two weeks, using Autobahn 2.0.

Telenomics in August became the first 3000 solution supplier other than HP to participate in the apps-on-tap segment of HP’s e-services campaign. (See our September front page story, “3000’s e-services get real at HP World” for details). To offer its telephone management services across the Internet starting next month, Telenomics needed a new Web-based interface for its PWARE application. While the application will be hosted on an HP 3000 in HP’s corporate datacenter, users of the service will be interfacing through Web browsers, tapping end-user code created with Autobahn.

HP recommended Autobahn to Telenomics as part of the 3000 division (CSY’s) new cooperative marketing agreement with Speedware. Telenomics needed Web enabling services for PWARE, and picked the Speedware development team to do the work. Speedware’s director of business development Steve Hanson said the project had a typical Internet schedule: Finish a functioning prototype in time for an HP World demonstration in a week and a half.

Hanson said Speedware met with Telenomics developers for a morning and got a database schemas from the PWARE 3000 server application and a sample of live data. “We came back about four days later with a functioning application running with the 3000 as the application server,” Hanson said. Windows NT functions as the Web server in the application, passing data between the 3000 and Web users. The finished app-on-tap generates reports from the 3000 that appear in browsers.

“Our goal is to be the premier Web enablement provider for the HP 3000,” Hanson said. “We’re trying to be as deeply involved as we can be in the fall launch of the HP 3000 for e-services. This way Speedware can grow its business as well as the 3000 installed base, providing applications that people will find attractive to use.”

With its process of giving old applications new looks, Speedware is targeting its Autobahn Web development services at software vendors in the 3000 community, as well as its own software partners. The company will be presenting an overview of its Web enabling products and capabilities at CSY’s E-services Summit this month.

“E-services, Web development and Web enablement all go hand in hand,” Hanson said. Speedware can also add Web OLAP analysis through its Media and Esperant products for Telenomics and other software vendors, he added.

Telenomics president Rick Hupe said the cooperative development delivered what was needed quickly. PWARE added a new way to present information to customers managing telephone call tracking, going beyond a 3000 session-based interface. Logging in at a designated Web site, customers can get reports on call tracking for their companies, information gathered by PWARE from PBX and Centrex units inside the customer’s company sites.

“We used [Autobahn] to take the data from the 3000 to the Web for the customers who will be doing e-services,” Hupe said. “We’re happy with it. Once we found out how eager they were to help us with this project and how easy it was to install, we never looked any further.”

Telenomics had considered Oracle tools for its own development effort of a Web client, since the company’s HP-UX version of the PWARE uses Oracle as its database. But keeping the e-services deployment on MPE/iX helped steer the company toward a 3000-based Web solution.

“Since the 3000 is such a workhorse and we love the 3000, we could see how we were going to be processing millions of transactions,” Hupe said. “The 3000 was an obvious choice.”

The Autobahn pricing for e-services application developers “is a new frontier,” Hanson said. In the apps-on-tap model, Speedware, HP (hosting the datacenter) and application provider all need to be compensated with each transaction. Another model is a subscription service for using Autobahn based on a period of service, such as per month or per year.

Speedware has Autobahn pricing models specific to software vendors, including discount schedules on licensing, or collecting a percentage of the application’s sale price. “We are as flexible as we can be in working with the software vendor, in the hope that everybody makes money,” Hanson said.

Although Autobahn integrates closely with the Speedware and Visual Speedware fourth generation languages (4GLs), applications need not use any 4GL to be able to leverage Autobahn’s Web enabling capabilities. Autobahn can call languages such as COBOL and C, Hanson said.

Even some PowerHouse customers have created Web applications using Autobahn, he added. One shop with 2 million lines of PowerHouse code, Idaho State University, created a campus-wide purchase order and requisition system. The university built the application in three weeks. The site converted some of its PowerHouse data dictionaries (PDL) to Speedware dictionaries in the development process.

Hanson said creating a Web-enabled application means rethinking design fundamentals for interfaces. “If you want to do an Autobahn application, it’s significantly different than doing a Speedware application,” Hanson said. He explained that the differences between a character- or screen-based interface and a Web interface are substantial.

Costs to end-customers for the product are in line with 4GL pricing: $4,000 per concurrent development seat, while user pricing ranges from $500 per concurrent user down to an unlimited user license at about $40,000. Speedware customers, and sites converting from other 4GLs, qualify for discounts of those prices.