New York, - Computer Generated Solutions, Inc. (CGS) of New York and Advanced Transition Technologies (AT2), Inc. of New York announced the signing of a significant agreement between the two companies. CGS is using AT2's flagship product ResQ! to create a new Graphical User Interface option for its leading product, ACS Optima, running on the IBM AS/400 platform. This new product option for CGS will be available to its customers in the first quarter of 1997.

CGS President and CEO Philip Friedman said: "This is an exciting development for us. We know our product is the best Sewn-Products trade software on the market. Using ResQ! to create a modern point-and-click front end customized for use by Administrators gives our customers what they have been demanding and keeps the competition in the background."

Jay Hakami, Vice President of the Product and Services division at CGS, added "CGS always emphasizes alignments with complementary products. This is another step toward offering the best solutions the marketplace has to offer." He also said that they plan a 1st quarter '97 general release of their newly customized ACS Optima. Hakami underscored the competitive importance of a user-friendly and easy-to-use product when he said, "We see tremendous demand for this product."

Debbie Wasko, an Apparel Systems Consultant with CGS, also said that with hundreds of different companies using the product, flexibility and the ability to integrate with other applications is just as important. "ResQ! gives us everything on our wish list. And AT2 has been with us every step of the way, including during the after-sale period when we were under tremendous time pressure to deliver a new customized version of Optima in time for the Bobbin Show."

Gad Janay, CEO of Advanced Transition Technologies, is equally delighted with the agreement. "In a business where one new fad replaces another so quickly that a project isn't even completed before the next is undertaken, there is a ground swell of common-sense demand for another, more efficient way to achieve modern functionality. And ResQ! is it."

Tod Yampel, president and COO of Advanced Transition Technologies added, "By the time reality sets in, those responsible for the decisions have moved on to other jobs or other companies to start the cycle all over again. We call this the tyranny of the techies over business."

Can much of the constant demand by IT staffs for new and bigger toys be justified by an enhanced bottom line? Often not, suggests Janay. "The constant cycle of introducing the latest hardware and software often doesn't improve services or products. What it can do, however, is erode whatever profitability it was intended to facilitate in the first place."

Advanced Transition Technologies has built an entire line of products that work in conjunction with ResQ! or as stand-alone products. Each rests on the product line's guiding principle of protecting and extending the enormous investments in mainframes and AS/400 systems. In an industry with an average product cycle of six months, Max Rosenblatt, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Advanced Transition Technologies declared, "Not only is it often illogical to migrate everything to client/server, the failure rates are staggering. There is no other industry that would continue to undertake these kinds of risky efforts when the failure rates are now higher than 40%."

To add insult to injury, he added, it is the cost of support that sends IT budgets into the stratosphere: "Client/server was supposed to have delivered us from this, and it has failed." Industry figures put C/S support at roughly twice what host applications now require. Most companies can't make a rational business case for all the new technology they're being sold today. We believe that unless your underlying business has changed, you are far better off adding to your existing system than trying to rewrite or reconfigure it."

ResQ! is a PC-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) product for Mainframes and AS400s, and is based on a patented new technology. It creates a modern Windows environment with point-and-click functionality for legacy applications through deep customization at the object level. ResQ! provides a full range of capabilities, normally requiring development tools, such as reordering the workflow, resetting tab orders, hiding fields, creating checkboxes and macro buttons, and providing context-sensitive Help and valid values at the PC, all without the need for any programming or special codes. ResQ! provides (1) the full functionality of the underlying host application, (2) integration with other Windows applications, and (3) value-added capabilities such as the ability to translate literals into native languages and the ability to edit character validation at the front end.