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March 29, 1999

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Tool Time For Y2K

Low-cost testing and remediation tools flood market

By Charles Waltner

Related links:

Year 2000 Resource Center

Enterprise Management Resource Center

Selected Year 2000 Tools as a PDF file. To view a PDF file, download the Adobe Acrobat Reader

And our sister publications:

InternetWeek Y2K Tests Put Financial Firms In Hot Seat

VARBusiness Y2K Testing Software

surge of affordable and diverse year 2000 testing and remediation software has hit the market during the past 12 months. Whether it's testing esoteric applications, remotely analyzing desktop hardware BIOS and time clocks, scrutinizing in-house databases, or remediating minicomputers, there's a tool to meet the needs and budgets of just about every small or midsize business.

"The market is saturated," says Andy Diamondstein, an analyst with Giga Information Group. That's great news for smaller companies that need to test desktop hardware and software, client-server networks, and minicomputers.

These packages are just in time for smaller businesses, many of which haven't been doing their Y2K homework. According to a Gallup poll for Wells Fargo Bank, 82% of small businesses are at risk for Y2K-related problems--and by this time last year, only half the companies familiar with the issue had made plans to address it.

Now, however, smaller companies have few excuses for not handling the problem--especially as the deadline nears. "It's never going to get better than this," says Andy Bochman, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group. "Two years ago, there was almost nothing on the market for the computer systems run by smaller businesses. Now there's abundant choice."

Choice is the key for companies selecting a Y2K testing tool. There's no one best product, say Bochman and other analysts. Companies need to pick the tool or tools that best fit their situation.

For example, Tim Cooley, owner of General Pest Control in Thousand Oaks, Calif., relies mostly on esoteric software created by small manufacturers for the billing and scheduling needs of the pest control industry. These PC-based applications aren't addressed in popular, low-cost Y2K testing tools such as Symantec's Norton 2000, which handles more popular applications from major manufacturers, such as Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect.

But Y2K TimeLab, from Vinca Corp., acts like an ad hoc test bed, Cooley says. It creates a buffer zone within any program, in which users can change dates and run tests. Cooley used it to check the Y2K readiness of the billing and scheduling applications on his company's six PC workstations running NT 4.0. "The beauty of the Y2K TimeLab is that it provides a quick and affordable way to test applications not covered by most shrink-wrapped Y2K tools," he says. Y2K TimeLab also works without shutting down or affecting key applications, which is crucial to a small company such as Cooley's.

Companies that need to ferret out problems with homegrown databases also have more tools to choose from. For example, Barry Brown, manager of IT services at the Atlanta accounting firm Moore Stephens Tiller, had to verify the date functionality of the data in the company's Microsoft Excel and Access applications. Brown's company relies heavily on the programs for much of the tax and financial work it performs for its 3,000 business clients. A Y2K glitch in just one of the databases could prove disastrous.

Brown found the ideal solution in IST Development Inc.'s Year 2000 Analysis Suite. IST designed its tools to drill down into the files of some of the most common business desktop applications, including Excel and Access, as well as programming languages such as Basic, Visual Basic, and Visual C/C++.

Moore Stephens Tiller operates four offices, each running Novell Intranetware on independent LANs. The company has a total of 110 employees and about 130 Pentium and Pentium II PCs running Windows 95. IST's tool uncovered problems in 2% to 3% of all the Excel and Access files, Brown says--more than enough to have caused his firm some serious headaches.

"If we'd done a manual exam, we'd never have been able to catch what IST's tool identified," Brown says. He estimates that the Y2K software saved his department hundreds of hours of work. More important, it's helped reassure him that all Y2K problems in his company's Access and Excel databases have been rooted out and fixed.

Most smaller businesses are also finding Y2K testing tools' costs affordable. Since client-server and desktop product licenses are usually per seat, prices scale down nicely to fit any budget--especially compared with what it would cost a company to do Y2K remediation without automating software.

For example, Joe Dyer, the client service manager at TTC, a Germantown, Md., manufacturer of testing equipment for telecommunications systems, used Netinventory from BindView Corp. to inventory and analyze the Y2K readiness of the company's 1,000 networked PCs. Dyer says Netinventory cost $15,000--but it saved his company $22,000 in labor costs.

Netinventory took only one day to remotely check the company's PCs; if technicians had had to run the checks in person, the process would have taken much longer, Dyer says. "Considering the time and money we saved, the cost of the tool was minimal," he adds.