News

Jasmine TND Adds "Neugents"

• By Scott Bekker
• 05/12/1999

LAS VEGAS – Computer Associates Inc. (CA, www.cai.com) has put a call out to all developers wanting to build smarter business applications. Using what CA calls Neugents, applications can not only analyze conditions in business markets and technical environments, but can also predict changes in those conditions. They also can suggest courses of action to proactively capitalize on opportunities and/or avoid potential problems.

This is wrapped into CA’s new information infrastructure, Jasmine TND (The Next Dimension). Also a part of this is 3D technology that CA is integrating into this infrastructure. "It is Computer Associate’s view that the use of 3D interfaces will be common place in the next 10 years," said Charles Wang, chairman and CEO of CA, during his keynote speech here at Networld+Interop. He says his company believes 3D technology to be the next level of user friendly interfaces, following up the browser.

CA is looking for Neugents to be adopted by ERP developers so software is developed for this platform. The problem is right now, leading ERP vendors such as SAP AG (www.sap.com) and PeopleSoft Inc. (www.peoplesoft.com) have been bending their backs over making their solutions Web enabled. To begin the project of integrating Neugent technology could become a major undertaking. Carl Hartman, vice president of information management marketing for CA, says this is the greatest opportunity for smaller ERP vendors to jump in and possibly get ahead of their high-end competitors.

Much of the infrastructure is similar to the aim of major Business Intelligence vendors as well, providing a Web portal to all structured and unstructured data. Hartman says this is "true" business intelligence because the Neugents will be making actual business decisions for the user. Hartman also says the infrastructure is n-tiered, so it can be used client/server or Web/mainframe. CA is providing a Neugent toolkit to help developers get underway. – Brian Ploskina