Naperville, IL - Building upon their strong success with a century dating solution for BPCS® ^® software, Nexgen now introduces an automated year 2000 solution for the general AS/400^® market. The software, Nexgen/2K, uses a sophisticated rules-based approach to significantly reduce the time, expense, and risk of year 2000 projects.

Using Nexgen/2K, clients can successfully century-enable a large, enterprise-wide system in just a few weeks. This offers clients a significant advantage over competing products, which require many months or even years to complete such projects.

Nexgen/2K expands and converts 6 character date fields in the data base to 8 characters, and year-only fields go from 2 to 4 characters. However, the date field display on screens and reports remains completely unchanged, so there’s no need to reformat display files or retrain users.

In sharp contrast to other year 2000 tools which emphasize project management or merely locate date fields, Nexgen/2K rapidly and reliably addresses the root of the problem: actually correcting the defects in the source code. Nexgen/2K’s powerful knowledge base consists of soft-coded "constructs" which identify failure points in the RPG and CL programming logic. Once the tool has identified century-ignorant code, it then automatically replaces it with century-compliant code.

The tool was built for ease of use, with an intuitive, PDM-like interface and thoughtful shortcut keys. Precise change log reporting and cross reference listings ensure complete traceability of all changes made by Nexgen/2K.

According to Rick Halsten, President and General Manager of Nexgen, the tool has exceeded expectations at its initial user site. "Our pilot client for the tool is a large multi-national pharmaceutical company with a complex mix of packaged software and home-grown add-ins. Their team evaluated all of the leading year 2000 tools on the market and really gave them a rigorous workout. Nexgen/2K emerged as the clear winner. It has significantly decreased the time required to correct their date problems, and has delivered unprecedented accuracy."

The tool runs on the IBM AS/400 and is appropriate for clients who have customized, home grown, or packaged software that does not support 21st century dating. Nexgen/2K fully supports RPG, CL, and DDS, and future versions will address other AS/400 programming environments such as AS/SET and COBOL.

Focus/2000, which uses the Nexgen/2K engine, is Nexgen’s fully-automated year 2000 solution for SSA’s BPCS® software package. Focus/2000 became generally available Jan. 31, 1997 and has already generated strong sales.

Nexgen/2K and Focus/2000 are available directly from Nexgen and from authorized distribution partners throughout the world.

Nexgen Software Technologies, Inc. is headquartered in Naperville, Illinois, a Chicago suburb in the area’s High Technology Corridor. Since 1990, Nexgen has focused on providing implementation and custom modification services to users of BPCS® from SSA and PRMS™^® from Computer Associates. Nexgen/2K, Inc. was founded in 1997 to market Focus/2000 as a millennium solution for the BPCS® market and Nexgen/2K as a millennium solution for other AS/400 software.

For more information, Nexgen can be reached at 280 Shuman Blvd., Suite 140, Naperville, IL 60563, USA. Telephone (630)300-6000, Fax (630)300-6122, and email info@nexgeninfo.com.

Nexgen/2K and Focus/2000 are trademarks of Nexgen Software Technologies, Inc.
AS/SET is a trademark and BPCS® is a registered trademark of System Software Associates, Inc.
PRMS™ is a registered trademark of Computer Associates International, Inc.
AS/400 is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation