Delays dog Unicenter

For a product claiming to have predictive powers, the shipping date of Computer Associates' Unicenter TND (The Next Dimension) systems management suite is distinctly uncertain.

TND, the next release of Unicenter, won't ship until early next year, CA executives said this week. TND was originally set for release at the beginning of this year; last month, CA told users it would not ship until at least December.

CA says it is forced to delay its availability until the underlying Jasmine ii (intelligent infrastructure) object-oriented technology, which underpins it, is more mature.

"TND is a huge product. We're in the early stages of beta testing now," Yogesh Gupta, the software giant's senior vice president of ebusiness strategy, said this week. "The question is: what do customers want and when do they feel it is ready?"

Gupta said the firm expects to have "several hundred beta customers by the end of this year", and that he would be "surprised" if it shipped this year.

TND is set to replace the existing TNG version of Unicenter. It features predictive technology using so-called neugents. These use agent software based on neural network technology, which is built into Jasmine ii.

"The benefit of TND is it allows people to look at information across the time dimension; that's why it is the next dimension," claimed Gupta.

"If you look at your network today, you can tell what it looks like now. You can't see what it looked like, say, last week. Using neugents you can predict what it will look like next week."

"People are still getting to grips with Unicenter TNG, so there won't be too much concern about delays to TND right now, " said Jim Fagan, president of the UK Unicenter Users' Association.

"Of more concern is that users want to see that investment in TNG will still be carried on in TND. If CA is going to use Jasmine as its basic infrastructure, there are concerns about it creating what is a proprietary customer base," he added.

Users include Royal & Sun Alliance, Sainsbury's, and Midlands Electricity.

First published in Computing