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New Year 1998
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JAC, developers and distributors of the highly acclaimed jBASE mvDBMS and OBjEX technology, have announced a number of important sales successes. At home companies such as First Direct Bank, Wolsey, Lawson Mardon Packaging, Alusuisse and Vencel Resil just to name a few have all signed with JAC.
ADP UK, a jBASE VAR, has also won several large deals in their industry most notably the Peugeot dealerships. These deals form a mixture of UNIX and NT successes proving that the jBASE technologies are cross platform and of industry strength.
Elsewhere in the world jBASE orders have accelerated, not least in Australia where CSC Healthcare replaced another mvDBMS as the preferred platform with jBASE. Already the first of an estimated 500+ Australian hospitals has gone live under jBASE and everyone involved talks of an excellent success. jBASE has grown fast ‘down under’, a world stronghold and believer of the mvDBMS.
Alasdair Munn of Citadel (jBASE distributor for the region), stated: “jBASE allows us to offer our VARs and end users a more flexible solution. Being able to ship existing applications with a jBASE mvDBMS back-end or say a Sybase or Oracle back-end provides the VARs with an edge over the competition that can only deliver a single database solution. The most impressive part of the jBASE approach is that there is zero change required in the BASIC application code itself!”
In the case of CSC it is a clear business requirement to provide its clients with a solution on the database of their choice. As the Health Service in Victoria is based entirely on the Sybase DBMS it was clear that a re-write or another route was required. CSC were overwhelmed with the ease at which jBASE allowed their applications to switch from a MultiValue back-end to a Sybase back-end.
In the USA one of the best known MultiValue VARs is Columbia Ultimate Business Systems (“CUBS”). CUBS ship the jBASE version of their “Collector” product under jBASE for NT and UNIX. Steps have also been taken to implement it as a web based application using jBASE OBjEX. In their case jBASE has allowed CUBS to steam ahead of the competition without major re-writes. CUBS also had the pleasure of installing the 10,000th jBASE user at Express Recovery Services back in September 1997.
On the east coast, CorrectNet Global Information Solutions are busy providing clients with Web solutions using jBASE as the web DBMS. CorrectNet’s object orientated Web development system (“InterBODE”) takes advantage of the small footprint, speed and scalability of jBASE to provide its customers with a first class Web application solution.
Strategy 7, a leading “MultiValue re-hoster” lead the distributor league in the US having shipped in excess of 1,000 users in 1997, (their first year as a jBASE distributor) and look set already, to exceed that by at least a factor of two in 1998.
In an exclusive interview with Clive Ketteridge, Managing Director of JAC, MultiValue News was able to ascertain some of the reasons behind this growing success. Ketteridge put it down to an excellently designed family of technologies, superb pre and post sales support, patience and hard work from everyone involved with jBASE within and in partnership with JAC.
“In the last 6 months we have seen a realisation that MV developers can have their cake and eat it, they can retain all their product and skills and extend these with jBASE and surge into new markets simply by utilising the flexibility that jBASE and jBASE OBjEX allows. A jBASE developer is a mainstream developer, of that there is no doubt.”
When asked about the Unidata/Vmark merger Ketteridge commented: “It provides an opportunity for JAC, in that the merger of UniVerse and Unidata will absorb a great deal of time and focus. Vmark appear to be focusing on Data Warehousing and Unidata, Object Relational Technology, somehow they will have to learn each other’s vision to form one. They will surely have to phase out one of the mvDBMSs: it cannot be practicable to maintain two of ‘the same’ indefinitely. JAC will surge ahead with its flexible technologies that will continue to serve the MultiValue development and end user community. Some have mentioned that the formation of the new $70m company will automatically push their mvDBMSs into the mainstream. I think not, as Oracle alone spend more than $70m on marketing a year. The Holy Grail for the MultiValue industry is to be seen and accepted as mainstream. The only way to do that is make the applications mainstream. jBASE does that.”
Last Updated: 09 Novemebr 1998