November 30, 1999

ADVANCED BusinessLink Corp. (ABL) announced support for the Wireless Markup Language (WML) in its Strategi middleware product November 29, becoming the first AS/400 software vendor to support the burgeoning Internet language. The announcement came on the heels of ABL's announced support for Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Strategi last month. WML, which is based on XML, allows cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) equipped with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browsers to access WML-based Internet sites. Leading cell phone manufacturers such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola are planning to release the first WAP-enabled phones this fall and upcoming winter.

AS/400 shops equipped with Strategi can serve WML pages and communicate interactively with WAP-enabled cell phone and PDA users. While consumers will mostly use the miniature WAP browsers to access email, news, weather, sports, and stock services on the Internet, AS/400 shops will most likely use the WML functionality in Strategi to connect remote employees with legacy applications through an intranet or extranet. For example, a sales representatives could remotely access his company's Strategi-powered AS/400 using a WAP-enabled cell phone to check on inventory status and have a quote emailed with the press of a button.

Scott McBurney, Strategi product manager, said that adding WML support in the High Speed Messaging (HSM) component of Strategi gives AS/400 programmers an easy way to reconfigure the system to send WML content through Strategi's Web server. "One intriguing thing with High Speed Messaging is you can have the back-end do whatever you want," McBurney said. "And it doesn't take high-level technical expertise to build the interface. Anybody with a few years of RPG can do it."

While the software is native to the AS/400 and loads in about 15 minutes, it will take an AS/400 programmer skilled in RPG, Java, C, CL, COBOL, or any other AS/400 languages a few days to build the WML extensions, ABL said. The company is offering to build WML extensions for its customers or provide training to AS/400 developers. The software is available immediately and starts at around $10,000.

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