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Venerable IMS still attracts tools

Princeton Softech, a provider of tools for managing data from heterogeneous databases, has extended its legacy tool to work with IMS. Far from being an historical footnote, the venerable mainframe-based IMS software from IBM is still in use at more than 95% of Fortune 1000 companies, said Jim Lee, vice president of product marketing for the Princeton, N.J.-based tool vendor.

''We've recently added support for IMS,'' he said while explaining the new features found in Version 5.1 of the firm's Relational Tools suite of application testing tools for the mainframe environment. ''We found, interestingly enough, that even though it is legacy, there are still quite a few large, large customers that run a lot of legacy IMS applications that relate to DB2. So we provide access to IMS data.''

The Princeton Softech tools are focused on managing the data being used in QA departments running testing technology from vendors such as Mercury Interactive, Lee explained.

QA professionals use the Princeton tools to extract data from a variety of databases, including Oracle, DB2, Sybase and Informix, for testing, Lee said. The suite also includes tools for creating and editing data for tests and for comparing data following tests, he added.

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Rich Seeley is Web Editor for Campus Technology.