Federal Court of Australia
FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA
CA Inc v Independent Systems Integrators Pty Limited (No 2) [2009] FCA 900
CA INC and CA (PACIFIC) PTY LIMITED v INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS INTERGRATORS PTY LIMITED
NSD 1572 of 2008
PERRAM J
18 AUGUST 2009
SYDNEY IN THE FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA
NEW SOUTH WALES DISTRICT REGISTRY
GENERAL DIVISION NSD 1572 of 2008
BETWEEN: CA INC
First Applicant
CA (PACIFIC) PTY LIMITED
Second Applicant
AND: INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS INTEGRATORS PTY LTD ACN 003 152 225
Respondent
JUDGE: PERRAM J
DATE OF ORDER: 18 AUGUST 2009
WHERE MADE: SYDNEY
THE COURT ORDERS THAT:
1. The parties are to bring in short minutes of order reflecting these reasons. 2. Costs reserved. 3. The matter be stood over for further directions on Tuesday 25 August 2009. Note: Settlement and entry of orders is dealt with in Order 36 of the Federal Court Rules. The text of entered orders can be located using eSearch on the Court's website. IN THE FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA
NEW SOUTH WALES DISTRICT REGISTRY
GENERAL DIVISION NSD 1572 of 2008
BETWEEN: CA INC
First Applicant
CA (PACIFIC) PTY LIMITED
Second Applicant
AND: INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS INTEGRATORS PTY LTD ACN 003 152 225
Respondent
JUDGE: PERRAM J
DATE: 18 AUGUST 2009
PLACE: SYDNEY
REASONS FOR JUDGMENT
Introduction 1 This is an application for preliminary discovery. The two applicants, who I will together call CA, conduct business as an international IT management software company. CA is a very substantial organisation with many software products and services amongst its various business lines. Amongst the products it delivers are two known as CA Datacom and CA Ideal. These software products are installed on mainframe computers and the clients who use them include very large organisations such as the US Customs Service. In this country they have included, as will become apparent, Macquarie Bank Limited. 2 CA Datacom is a program which manages large databases. It is installed by CA customers on mainframes. The programs operating on such systems can be visualised as working at different levels. At the highest level are those programs which interact directly with the customer's own staff and users. These are generally known as applications. At the lowest level is a set of programs usually referred to as the operating system, which carry out the functions of running the mainframe at its most basic level. CA Datacom exists in between these two levels. It carries out the processes and steps which are necessary to manage the databases in its care. However, the staff and users of particular customers do not use it directly. Instead they interact with the customer's own specifically designed applications which, in turn, deal with CA Datacom. 3 The customers' applications can be written in any higher level computer language which runs on the mainframe such as COBOL. Any customer application written in these languages needs to be able to communicate effectively with CA Datacom itself. To that end the customers of CA Datacom are given access to proprietary information belonging to CA to permit their own programmers to design their applications in a way which fosters that communication. For those inclined towards total packages, CA also produces its own computer language which customers can use for writing their own applications. This product, or language, is called CA Ideal. Presumably, the advantage of using CA Ideal is that it is specifically designed for ease of interaction with CA Datacom. 4 The market for software that manages large databases on mainframes is not closed and CA Datacom is not alone in that market. It faces competition from a product made by IBM called DB2. CA Datacom and DB2 are both sophisticated products. However, the ways in which the two competing products structure and manage the data for which they are responsible are not the same and they are not compatible. Data stored in a form comprehensible to CA Datacom cannot be managed by DB2, or vice versa. 5 From time to time, organisations using one brand of database management software might wish to switch to another. Two obstacles lie in the path of an organisation in that position. First, it is necessary that all of the data managed by the first product be translated into a format compatible with the second. Secondly, all of the customer's applications which formerly interacted with the first database product need to be re-written so that they can interact with the second. Both of these steps can be onerous; the first, often enough because of the sheer size of the databases in question; the second, because customers' applications are often the result of many years of refinement. A further practical difficulty exists. Frequently, the databases in question are extremely large and of a kind whose unavailability can be tolerated only for very short periods of time. The time therefore for large scale data migration is generally very limited. 6 There are thus created the economic incentives for the coming into existence of the respondent's suite of products called "2BDB2". For present purposes, three elements of the suite are relevant. The first is a program called the 2BDB2 Datacom Data Converter. I do not apprehend this product to be in dispute and mention it only to increase the coherence of the present account. The Datacom Data converter program takes data managed by CA Datacom and, as the name suggests, converts it into a format which can be managed by IBM's DB2 database management program. The conversion process may be extensive and the converter permits partial conversion or conversion in steps. This last quality should be noted as it is of particular significance. 7 The second element in the suite is the 2BDB2 Datacom Transparency product. It interposes itself within the customer's mainframe in such a way that the customer's applications communicate with it rather than with CA Datacom. Putting the matter somewhat loosely Datacom Transparency is a bilingual program with a "trick". It is bilingual because it can understand the CA Datacom statements made by the customer's applications and it can translate them into statements which can be understood by DB2 (and vice versa). The trick is that the program knows which parts of the customer's databases have been converted by the Datacom Data Converter to DB2 format and which have not. When Database Transparency identifies that a request has been made by a customer's application which relates to data still being managed by the CA Datacom software, it simply passes the request on to CA Datacom. When the CA Datacom software replies it passes that reply back to the customer's application. 8 When CA Datacom Transparency detects that the customer's application is dealing with data which has already been converted to DB2 format by the Datacom Data Converter, it translates the request – which originally assumes that the recipient is CA Datacom – into a request which will make sense to DB2. It then passes the request on. When DB2 responds CA Datacom Transparency reinterprets the output back into a format which emulates the response which would have come from CA Datacom. 9 Under neither scenario is the customer's application "aware" of the presence of Datacom Transparency. Together, CA Datacom Data Converter and Datacom Transparency enable a customer to convert parts of its database to DB2 format without having to rewrite any of its applications. The partial conversion of the databases is desirable because it allows a cautious approach to be adopted to a large undertaking thus permitting ease of troubleshooting. It also allows database conversion to proceed in small steps which do not require the large scale shutting down of the system. 10 The third item in the suite is called 2BDB2 Ideal. This product is able to convert customer applications which have been written in CA's Ideal language into COBOL applications which will operate in a DB2 environment. 11 Each of these three products facilitates migration of data from a CA Datacom environment to a DB2 environment. A customer whose applications are written in Ideal needs only the Datacom Data Converter and 2BDB2 Ideal to carry out the migration. A customer whose applications are written in any other language needs the Datacom Data Converter and Datacom Transparency programs. 12 The migration of customers from a CA Datacom environment to a DB2 environment is a state of affairs to which CA is naturally disinclined. That disinclination has provoked in CA a curiosity as to how 2BDB2 operates. The slaking of that curiosity gives rise to the present circumstances about which it is now necessary to say a few words.
We try to embed the page this law was scraped from. If the site blocks framing, you still get the link and a local excerpt.
Last checked with source on —
Checking whether the official page can be embedded…
Plain-English simplify of this law: a short summary, key points, and both sides of the argument. Generated on first view via Replicate, then cached. Vote on what helps your study.
No study brief is cached for this law yet. Sign up to generate a plain-English brief.
Sign up to generate