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The history of Natural/FRS begins in 1988 when Software AG entered into a three-way agreement with Texas A&M University System (TAMU) and Information Associates to reengineer an existing software package proven in the industry to be best-of-breed among similar financial account systems. Texas A&M requested this agreement for the purpose of acquiring a Natural /ADABAS version of the highly popular FRS-Plus COBOL/VSAM financial accounting software developed by Information Associates. The Information Associates software is now owned by the SCT Corporation. After the successful implementation at Texas A&M, Software AG began to market the mainframe based software to it's existing client base which consisted of many higher-education institutions running Natural and ADABAS system software. With the success of the project at Texas A&M, several more colleges and universities purchased the financial records system from Software AG. The majority of colleges and universities were running DOS and MVS based operating systems, but a few were on alternative platforms such as VMS and UNIX. The Natural/FRS application, true-to-form written in the 4th Generation Language Natural, was simply transferred to the alternate platform and re-compiled. As it stands today, there are OS390, DOS/VSE, UNIX, and VMS sites running the same Natural/FRS source code. In addition to these platforms mentioned, Natural/FRS has been successfully tested on the Windows NT/2000 platform. Because of organizational changes within Software AG, the responsiblity for vertical applications, such as Natural/FRS, was passed between many different departments. Ultimately, vertical applications in general were not seen as a strategic market for Software AG and support for all but a few of them was dropped. When this occured, it left a vast hole in the future of the product and many uncertainties for those utilizing Natural/FRS. This is when and why McNutt Consulting was formed. A VAR (Value Added Reseller) agreement was negotiated with Software AG and an indepentent software maintenance contract was negotiated with each customer to facilitate on-going support. Since this time, McNutt Consulting has continued to resolve issues and provide user-requested enhancements to the system. Additionally, new interfaces to the data have been developed including a datawarehouse solution and a web-enabled solution. McNutt Consulting also provides many customers with professional services support for developing custom software solutions tailored around Natural/FRS.
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