The Key

by Martin J. Garvey

E-business opportunities await those companies whose data is locked up in hard-to-reach legacy systems. EnableHTML software is designed to give businesses a fast, easy way to bring data tied up in mainframes and AS/400 systems to the Web.

EnableHTML uses an HTML interface and lets any user with a Web browser access legacy data in seconds, the company says. Enable's existing software, Enable, as well as competing products from iNet Technologies Inc. and Seagull Software Solutions Inc., require users to download Java applets to receive such data-a process that can take 10 minutes.

"Our customers won't wait around for Java to load," says Lewis Wolfe, computer services manager at Farmers Mutual Protective Association, a $40 million insurance company in Temple, Texas. "With the Portal product, we could write a customer number on a policy application, and then the customers can look up information about their policies on the Web."

While Wolfe looks forward to the upgrade to extend services to customers over the Web, Farmers Mutual insurance agents have been using the existing Enable product for almost a year to obtain customer data over the Web from an AS/400e system. Enable takes an AS/400 3270 & 5250 data stream and converts it to a Java applet, with no programming on our part," says Wolfe.

Custom development of a system to accomplish this same task was not an option for the firm, which has a seven-person IT staff. "That stuff is pretty complicated and you've got to be really committed to do serious Java development," says Wolfe.

EnableHTML will let customers look up policy information on the Web, Wolfe says.

Hiring outside developers would have cost Farmers Mutual hundreds of thousands of dollars, he says. Enable cost $16,000 up front plus $1,200 annually for maintenance. "Enable lets us compete with companies that have deeper pockets," says Wolfe.

Enable is creating a third generation of Web access to legacy data products, says Anura Guruge, publisher of i-BigBlue Professionals Monthly news-letter. Web-to-legacy products in their first generation lacked functionality, and in their second generation, they couldn't handle high capacity, he says. But Enable turns mainframes, which can handle as many as 40,000 concurrent sessions over the Internet, and AS/400s, which can manage as many as 10,000 simultaneous sessions, into Web servers.

"Now customers at the high end can do automatic rejuvenation of ugly legacy screens with no complex programming, using drag-and-drop to design a sophisticated Web interface that completely hides the back end," Guruge says.