Primeon offers Y2K analysis tool
The company rolls out a new Year 2000 bug remediation tools and services package for auditing previously converted code.
Primeon Y2K Audit, is a set of tools and services designed to analyze Y2K-remediated distributed code and identify remaining problems while they are still relatively inexpensive to fix, before testing begins, the company said.
Pretest audits, also called secondary impact analyses, are quickly becoming a crucial, and some believe mandatory, phase of Y2K compliance, the company said. Primeon will now offer offsite secondary impact analysis service for distributed, client-server systems.
Industry observers said pretest Y2K audits have become an essential element in the Year 2000 compliance process, because they reduce testing time and costs for a company, but these services have been few and far between for distributed systems.
Based on Primeon's identification and remediation tool set, The Primeon Audit Service supports more than thirty languages and platforms, including C, C++, Visual Basic, Power Builder, Informix, and Cobol, the company said.
The millennium bug could make computers malfunction or shut down because manufacturers used only the last two digits for the year. At the turn of the century computers may mistakenly read the year 2000 as 1900.
Although typical Y2K remediation services and tools providers usually check their work before they go and do final tests on the code they have fixed, the idea of pretest audit testing as a separate product or service is relatively new as a method within the Y2K conversion process.
"As far as I know, they [Primeon] are the only ones that will come in afterwards to check other providers' work," said Andy Bochman, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group . "There are three groups that this benefits, one: the direct customer; two: if it's a publicly held company, the board of directors; and it also is good for regulators, because it is an outside check on the remediation process."
The Primeon Y2K Audit Service is available now and is priced at 10 cents per line of code.