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Last-Minute Y2K Fix

Data Integrity provides software for fast, accurate date-field work

InformationWeek - November 16, 1998

There's still hope for businesses that are behind on year 2000 work. Software from Data Integrity Inc. (dii) promises to ferret out noncompliant mainframe code and fix it--fast.

According to IS professionals and analysts, Data Integrity's products are the fastest and most accurate tools available for updating and testing mainframe applications written in Cobol, IBM Assembler, RPG for AS/400, and PL/1 for MVS and VM mainframes. Millennium Solution™ provides year 2000 remediation and validation, while Millennium CrossCheck™ scans for noncompliant code.

Ed Socks, year 2000 project coordinator at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Albuquerque, N.M., says Data Integrity's products burn through year 2000 changes in mainframe programming. Last spring, Socks accurately remediated 1.5 million lines of Cobol code in less than a week using Millennium Solution. The software cost about $200,000, or about 14 cents per line of code, Socks says, and it got the job done ahead of schedule.

"Data Integrity delivered on its promise," he says. "We've run many of our programs since the fix, and they're doing fine." Millennium Solution is also easy to use, Socks says. His staff needed only one day of training to get up and running; other products Socks looked at required one to two weeks of off-site classes.

While Data Integrity faces competition from a host of competitors, including Compuware, Platinum Technology, and Viasoft, analysts say the speed of Data Integrity's tools is noteworthy, especially given the time crunch facing most IS managers still racing to reprogram their computer systems. "In a world full of over-hype and late-to-market year 2000 panaceas, [Data Integrity's] solution seems too good to be true," says Andrew Bochman, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group. "But our research indicates that Data Integrity's tools are as good as they seem."

Data Integrity, which employs more than 20 people, projects revenue of up to $30 million this year, triple its 1997 revenue. The company bolstered its position in the market last month when it received a patent on its unique mathematical approach to year 2000 remediation and testing. Data Integrity also struck a partnership last month with Walker Inc., a provider of financial, operational, and analytic applications, for Walker to use Data Integrity's tools at Delta Technology Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. Data Integrity's other customers include Citibank, Credit Suisse, First Boston, NationsBank, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Data Integrity started in 1984 as a technology developer and IT consulting company. But in 1995, when the year 2000 problem was gaining urgency, Allen Burgess, president of the company, woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a mathematical approach to year 2000 remediation that would greatly speed the process.

Typical remediation approaches look for field descriptors based on a predefined list of key words that indicate data usage--for example, a row of data titled "date." The problem with this method is that programmers can give date-sensitive data variables any name they want. Chris Dowdell, a VP at Data Integrity, says one programmer named a date row "Shirley" because at the time he was writing the program, he was dating a woman named Shirley.

Data Integrity's software, on the other hand, searches for mathematical programming commands such as "sort," "subtract," and "perform until." There are only about 30 commands in mainframe programming languages that refer to mathematical functions involving dates.

'Not The Silver Bullet'
Though Data Integrity's products are potent for solving year 2000 glitches in common mainframe languages, the software is limited. Millennium Solution and Millennium CrossCheck aren't able to handle embedded database applications or modern client-server programs written in C+ or other languages, though the company plans to update its products next month to handle

C-based languages. "Data Integrity's products are not the silver bullet, but for [mainframe] code, they're a good thing," says Socks at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "I just can't get too excited about it because I've got a lot more than those languages to troubleshoot before 2000."

Despite their limitations, Data Integrity's tools are an important resource for companies finishing up their year 2000 mainframe work. Roy Daheb, VP of year 2000 and IT consulting at Walker, says Walker will use Millennium CrossCheck to verify remediation work performed at major clients such as American Express and Delta Air Lines. "That's where we want to go 100% with Data Integrity," Daheb says. "It's a unique tool for examining year 2000 renovation."

Aberdeen's Bochman says testing could make or break some companies in the year 2000 process. Many businesses haven't allocated enough time for testing, which he says will account for at least 50% of the time and resources spent on the year 2000 remediation process. Testing is crucial, Bochman adds, because code-remediation changes could cause bugs in other areas of a program, putting businesses in even greater danger of downtime from year 2000 glitches.

To use Data Integrity's products, companies must first download their mainframe code to ASCII files. The Millennium tools break the code into subsets, then search for every operational function that relies on a computation-related command. Both Millennium Solution and Millennium CrossCheck run algorithms to look for date variables associated with these commands. CrossCheck then creates a file flagging these discoveries.

Millennium Solution continues by fixing errors with another mathematical solution. Most year 2000 remediation products use techniques such as date expansion and windowing. These approaches change date years in computer code to four digits, so the computer can read "1998" or "2098" rather than just "98." Millennium Solution fixes the year 2000 date problem by inserting a date-routine algorithm into existing code that "trains" the computer to see "00" as the year 2000.

Dramatic Advantages
The advantages of this approach are dramatic, according to customer reports. One Data Integrity user, an IS manager at a large financial institution who requested anonymity, says his company conducted a "bake off" with various programs for Cobol remediation. He says Data Integrity's Millennium Solution program won easily. "The results were absolutely phenomenal," the IS executive says. He says Solution took about four hours, including manual follow-up, to fix 20,000 lines of code, and was extremely accurate. The closest competitor would have taken weeks.

Millennium CrossCheck, meanwhile, can greatly speed the testing process by catching most glitches remaining after remediation, Dowdell says. It's expensive to go back and fix flaws in coding during the testing process, he adds.

CrossCheck offered an important boost to the year 2000 initiatives at the U.S. Department of the Interior in Herndon, Va. The product took only a day to verify the accuracy of the remediation work on 225,000 lines of Cobol code, says Randy Maples, year 2000 coordinator at the chief strategic direction and coordination branch of the minerals-management service. "It provided an excellent audit trail for us," Maples says. The Interior Department's year 2000 work must pass a formal government approval process, he adds, and CrossCheck helped assure his staff that their work had fixed any year 2000 bugs.

Data Integrity figures the year 2000 remediation and testing market will remain viable for several years past the turn of the century. Most businesses are just focusing on critical applications now; they'll have many other applications to fix in the coming years.

Data Integrity prices its products by line of code. Typically, prices range from 5 cents to 10 cents per line for CrossCheck and 10 cents to 20 cents per line for Solution. Businesses can also outsource remediation work to Data Integrity, which would add a surcharge to these basic rates. Customers say Data Integrity's prices are comparable to, if not a little more expensive than, those of competing software.

Next up, Data Integrity plans to parlay its basic technology into tools for general code testing once the year 2000 problem cools down, says president Burgess. If its current products are any measure, Data Integrity should do just fine.

By Charles Waltner
Photo by Bill Cramer

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