Company News: PKWARE® Continues Commitment to Day One Support of IBM® Mainframe Releases

With the planned availability of the zEnterprise 196™ and z/OS® v1.12 next month, PKWARE is pleased to reiterate our continued commitment to Day One support for these and other new releases of IBM’s mainframe hardware and operating system.

As an early release participant, PKWARE works extensively with both IBM and PKWARE customers to ensure that PKZIP® for z/OS and SecureZIP® for z/OS both process optimally in the new environments and take advantages of IBM’s latest advances. PKWARE ensures quality of service by performing extensive regression and functionality tests of its software on the new operating system and hardware in the months leading up to IBM’s releases.

Last month, IBM announced its new mainframe model, the zEnterprise 196 (a.k.a. the z196), and z/OS v1.12, the flagship operating system for the System z mainframe. The hardware has a planned availability date of September 10, 2010, while the software is planned for release on September 24. PKZIP for z/OS and SecureZIP for z/OS will be ready with Day One support for both the new hardware and software.

Many of PKWARE’s mainframe customers plan to use new features of the IBM operating system and hardware to condense systems, better controlling IT costs and exploiting technology to improve staff and resource efficiency.

“Customers around the world ask IBM to include PKZIP for z/OS and SecureZIP for z/OS in the software stack they ensure is compliant with each new release of IBM software and hardware. We are fortunate and pleased that our mainframe customers rely on our products to this degree for their mission-critical processing,” explains Joe Sturonas, PKWARE Chief Technology Officer. “We’re equally grateful that IBM includes PKWARE in its Early Ship Program, so we can assure our customers of full support on the first day a new version of IBM’s operating system or hardware is released.”

PKZIP for z/OS provides file management and data compression, which results in more efficient data exchange through reduced transmission times and required storage requirements. By using the ZIP standard, the most widely used file standard in the world, PKZIP allows you to easily exchange data across all major enterprise computing platforms more efficiently and effectively.

SecureZIP for z/OS is an optimal solution for providing durable security to protect data while it resides on z/OS or moves to other platforms, all while leveraging existing investments in hardware cryptographic acceleration within the mainframe environment. The SecureZIP family of products is interoperable, providing users comprehensive data protection across all major computing platforms.

For more information about specific PKZIP and SecureZIP versions and available levelsets, please visit http://www.pkware.com/support/mainframe.

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