IBM and Millennium Vue Team Up for Year-2000 Countdown
Millennium Date Compression Tool Designed to help Large System Users Ease Transition to Year 2000
MCLEAN, Va. (November 04, 1998) – Millennium Vue, Inc., a software integration firm based here, today said it will market an IBM software tool designed to help large system users ease the transition into year 2000.
The Millennium Date Compression Tool (MDCT) was originally developed by Allstate Insurance, which is using it to assist in making its computer applications Year-2000 ready.
“IBM is making available to the marketplace technology that has been developed by its customers and proven beneficial in readying their applications for the Year 2000,” said Yvonne Perkins, director of application development technology at IBM. “We want to make this technology available to other companies to assist them as well.”
The MDCT tool was developed for use with MVS and OS/390 operating systems, as well as for Assembler, COBOL, PL/I, Easytrieve and CICS environments. MDCT runs ”on the fly” during normal program execution and replaces dates past 1999 in a compressed two-digit “AO” format. The tool can be used effectively to change dates in applications through the year 2059, without affecting the historical data or source code.
Millennium Vue CEO Richard J. Yoder said the MDCT tool is particularly cost effective because it saves time and, therefore, money. “By maximizing up-front analysis, the tool significantly reduces the amount of time people need to spend checking and changing dates,” he said.
Allstate Insurance used MDCT to change the dates on one computer application that processes about 20 million insurance policies every day. According to Allstate assistant vice president Kim Van Nostern, it took two people less than three months to complete work that would have taken 35 people three years to complete using more traditional date expansion techniques.
“Using MDCT, we completed our work months ahead of schedule and with no noticeable degradation in the performance of applications,” she said.
MDCT offers a wide range of benefits:
fast-track implementation and testing
significant reduction in costs compared to other available windowing or expansion techniques
fewer programming resources required
a fixed-price solution
functionality through the year 2059
While not appropriate for use in all large systems, MDCT can help many applications transition past the Year 2000.
Source: IBM