Attachmate gives green screens Vista treatment

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Emulation services vendor, Attachmate has released the next version of its terminal emulation product for IBM mainframes, Reflections 2007.

The vendor is touting the fact that the Reflections for IBM 2007 has been completely re-written to advantage of feature enhancements in Microsoft's latest operating system (OS), Vista. The product has been certified to run on the OS.

Neil Harrison, Attachmate technical services director told IT PRO this release was aimed at helping enterprises with heavy mainframe investments migrate to Vista.

"One of the main obstacles to Vista adoption is the lack of application support," he said. "This release has been built from the ground up to work with the new OS and enhance the ability to integrate mainframe application data into Microsoft Office, for example."

Harrison added that improvements to the terminal emulation services available through the new release also allow for interoperability with LDAP directory services including Microsoft Active Directory, internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Citrix environments.

And tools like spell check, screen history, auto complete, auto expand, scratch pad and recent typing have been included to bring modern productivity enhancing features to traditional 'green screen' host applications running on IBM mainframes.

Other features are aimed at securing data and networks, as well as meeting increasing regulatory requirements, given that "our customer base of mainly banks and telcos are using tens of thousands of licences," said Harrison.

Reflections for IBM 2007 includes client-side support for most security protocols including SOCKS as well as cryptographic modules built to meet US Federal information processing standards (FIPS) 140-2 and Department of Defence (DoD) class 3 public key infrastructure (PKI) public key-enabled (PKE) application requirements.

"This release is valuable given the increased investment IBM is making in mainframes," he said. "Mainframes will continue to offer a viable alternative to the cost of running distributed applications on high cost and maintenance UNIX or Linux server farms."

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