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Winter 1998
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The annual Pick Systems conference is now a firm date in the calendars of Pick and Pick-like VARs. In complete contrast to last year's Center Parcs extravaganza, Pick Systems Conference '98 was held in the impressive surroundings of the ICC in Birmingham and for the first time was open to both end-users and VARs. More than 120 delegates and speakers from the UK, Europe and Russia, explored the theme of adapting to meet the changing requirements of customers and embracing and exploiting the benefits of new technology.
New product announcements from Pick Systems confirmed D3 as the product to take Pick and Pick-like VARs into the next millenium, and highlighted Pick Systems' continuing commitment to product development. In addition to the existing product range, D3 Solaris will be in production from January next year; D3Unixware will be available during 1999; D3 Linux, already in production, now ships with a full version of Red Hat Linux 5.2 and FlashCONNECT provides a simple method of web-enabling existing applications.
Coyote, Pace and Repton Data's exciting new tools to simplify the process of moving text based applications into an integrated graphical environment were enthusiastically received by the delegates, as was Pick's new involvement with KPMG in the migration of legacy Pick applications to D3.
Bravely Pick had invited Bruce Leigh from Aries Business Systems, a long time Pick VAR, who had already redeveloped his applications in Windows to give his experiences of moving into the graphical world. He presented a depressing tale of endless re-writes, constantly changing environments, increased manpower and slipping timescales. However he stressed the sales advantage to be gained from having a GUI based application and added that if he were starting again he would certainly consider Visual Basic, ODBC and D3 as an alternative.
Helphire Group Plc, an end user in the insurance market with 200 users, offices throughout the country and a business growing at 300% per year, run D3 at the heart of their system and SQL Server as part of MS BackOffice. They were able to make impressive comparisons estimating D3 to operate 7 times faster than SQL Server.
The overall message from the conference was that change is a necessity but that Pick is fostering tools and ideas to help its VARs in that process.
The conference closed with the presentation of awards to Pick System's top VARs for 1998 Zisk, Adserve and Sanderson Cotswold.
Last Updated: 22 December 1998