MANASYS Jazz Background
The first versions of MANASYS were developed in the late 1970's for the IBM DOS/VSE
and MVS market, initially focussing on reporting and similar batch tasks, although
later MANASYS also developed the ability to generate CICS tasks. Its distinguishing
feature was that it functioned with the simplicity and power of report writers like
Easytrieve, but by creating intermediate-language programs in either PL/I or COBOL
it could be extended with the full power of these languages. The product was successfully
sold throughout Australia and New Zealand.
In the 1980's MANASYS was redeveloped for the Fujitsu market, becoming closely integrated
with Fujitsu's AIM system (the Fujitsu equivalent of IBM's IMS DB/DC), and other
Fujitsu software. This brought MANASYS into the world of relational databases and
interactive programs. The product was sold by Fujitsu Australia as a strategic software
product, and for a period was extremely successful. However with the decline of
the mainframe market the product was eventually stablized, and MANA Systems Ltd
turned its attention to application software.
In 2013 an approach was received seeking an IBM version of MANASYS. This initiated
the developement of MANASYS-Jazz, which is a complete re-visioning of the original
product. It now runs on a Windows platform, generating objects (COBOL programs,
CICS maps, WSDL message descriptions etc) that are sent to/from the mainframe with
FTP. Although Jazz draws on the proud legacy of MANASYS, it is a completely new
product with new and improved features.