Kirkland WA, September 1998

ADVANCED BusinessLink announced today that the AS/400 client applet in Strategi™, its native e-business enabling technology, has been awarded 100% Pure Java(tm) certification from Sun Microsystems. ADVANCED BusinessLink now joins an impressive group of companies from diverse software markets whose applications have been certified as 100% Pure Java by Sun Microsystems, Inc. The 100% Pure program sets the standard for application development in the Java(tm) programming language for the industry.

"BusinessLink has demonstrated a strong commitment to Java technology from the beginning," said Bob Braham, director of developer marketing at Sun Microsystems' Java Software. "We are very proud to once again award BusinessLink 100% Pure Java certification, this time for their Strategi technology."

Those sentiments were echoed by BusinessLink CEO Chris Lategan, "We were pioneers when we first introduced our concept to the industry," comments Lategan. "The perception in the AS/400 marketplace at that time was that Java was of limited commercial use - best suited to web page animation and sprites. However, at the time there was a tremendous industry need for remote users to be able to access the information on the AS/400, and with the exploding numbers of users out there, it was evident that support-intensive fat clients like Client Access were not going to be practical for much longer. We had to find a technology that would allow us to do the same sorts of tasks with a browser-based client. Java allowed us to develop that.

"Our Java-based vision was affirmed with the remarkable performance of the applet and the instant industry demand for similar products. This year Java continues to be the hot topic with both IBM and the AS/400 community. We have since developed two more generations of technology based on the Java platform and feel very proud to have successfully completed Sun's 100% Pure Java testing and certification process."

BusinessLink's Strategi™ applet provides full AS/400 terminal emulation functionality, allowing authorized users to access the host system as if they were in the same room. Users have a choice of text-based or point-and-click interfaces, while the applet facilitates printing and file transfer using an in-built Push Technology engine. Despite its tiny size (about 70K; some of the now emerging first generation competitive applets are around 1Mb, making them impractical for browser use over the Internet), BusinessLink's applet capability even includes industrial strength cryptography and comprehensive host-central management. It is also the the first of the native AS/400 products to use digital certificate technology to both authenticate client identity and provide an infrastructure to manage host access.

Market demand for BusinessLink's technology continues to grow dramatically - Scott McBurney from the sales and marketing team points out that AS/400 increasingly need to provide access to unprecedented numbers of users, including field sales personnel, clients, vendors, and customers. "Some of these companies have over 10,000 users. Java applets are the only answer - can you realistically hope to distribute, load, configure and manage that many users with a fat client?"

The applets in both Strategi™ by ADVANCED BusinessLink and BusinessLink for JAVA™ carry the 100% Pure Java logo.