PITTSBURGH, May 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing the trend that has plagued Y2K remediation efforts, nearly one-third of the compliance status changes detected in April by Infoliant Corporation's Compliance Tracker were negative as manufacturers disclosed previously unknown Y2K issues or announced the discontinuation of support for non-compliant products. No single manufacturer dominated the results of the April Compliance Tracker Delta Report which tracks and reports the Year 2000 compliance status of desktop, network and enterprise software and hardware products. However, many manufacturers did change the compliance status for multiple products during the month of April. In total, 604 products underwent a status change, slightly more than the number of changes recorded in the March Delta Report.

Infoliant found that another one-third of the changes logged in April were attributed to a product's re-designation as ``Pending Evaluation''. Infoliant's research team, which actively monitors the Y2K compliance status of more than 33,000 products from over 600 hardware and software manufacturers, will continue to work with these manufacturers to determine the true compliance status of each product. Most of the remaining products that had compliance changes in April were moved from ``Pending Evaluation'' to a known status, often after Infoliant's research team made direct requests for disclosure from the manufacturer. There were also several dozen instances of manufacturers delivering Y2K patches or upgrades for products that were previously categorized as ``Non-compliant.''

``We were initially surprised by the sudden increase in the number of products changing compliance status during March. The results for April and the products currently under review by our research team indicate that even more testing, patching, and disclosure is coming from information technology manufacturers at all levels,'' said Kevin J. Weaver executive vice president and co-founder of Infoliant. ``This changing information makes the task of preparing off-the-shelf products for the Year 2000 harder than initially thought. Even for organizations which have completed a substantial portion of their preparations, Compliance Tracker is the most convenient way to manage a ''clean`` environment.

The changing compliance information issue is even larger than the Delta Report indicates. Each month, manufacturers make hundreds of changes to the corrective action plans required to make their products Y2K ready. These updates are detected by Compliance Tracker and disseminated to subscribers, but are not included in the Delta Report because the product's compliance status has not changed. Some manufacturers have revised the status of their products as many as nine times since Infoliant began tracking Y2K compliance in 1997, including significant updates to patches previously believed to correct all known Y2K issues for a specific product. The Year 2000 Network Advisor and Compliance Tracker are time and cost-effective vehicles to get the current information on Y2K compliance.

Infoliant's Compliance Tracker Delta Report tracks statistics regarding the products which change Year 2000 compliance status within Infoliant Corporation's Year 2000 Network Advisor knowledgebase, the leading resource for Y2K readiness information of off-the-shelf information technology products. The Year 2000 Network Advisor and Compliance Tracker are accessible through a variety of media, including a Web-based subscription service, and fully-mirrored versions of the knowledgebase via Infoliant's Millennium Direct Web, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access '97, and HP AssetView Editions.

More information about the Year 2000 Network Advisor, Compliance Tracker, and the latest Delta Report is available on the web at http://www.infoliant.com or by calling 1-888-925-5478.

SOURCE: Infoliant Corporation