DBMS Client/Server Connection - June 1995 DBMS Client/Server Connection - June 1995Sybase Inc. (Emeryville, Calif.) fell under fire in April when it announced that its first-quarter revenues would fall short of expectations: $213 million instead of the expected $233 million. Shareholders, who were expecting to earn 29 cents per share, were told that they would earn only three cents per share. On April 4th, when analysts were informed of the shortfall, Sybase's stock price fell 41 percent, plunging more than 16 points to 23.
In addition, several investors filed lawsuits in a San Francisco federal court, charging that Sybase executives knew the stock was in trouble and sold several thousand shares before the price was affected by the bad news. Sybase officials deny the charges.
One of the likely reasons for the revenue shortfall is smaller-than-expected revenue from Sybase's newly acquired company, Powersoft (Concord, Mass.). Sales of PowerBuilder have fallen off in recent months. Sybase Inc., 510-922-3500.
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Gupta Corp. (Menlo Park, Calif.) announced in April that it has named Sam Inman as president and chief operating officer. Inman will share management of the company with Umang Gupta, who relinquishes the title of president but retains his position as chairperson and chief executive officer.
Inman was most recently president and chief operating officer of Ingram Micro, and spent 21 years at IBM Corp. His duties at Gupta will include heading up the company's marketing, sales, technical services, customer operations and controls, distribution, and MIS departments. Gupta will focus on the company's corporate and product strategy functions.
According to Gupta, the reason for adding Inman to the company's executive team is to help the company prepare for its next growth phase. "As Gupta Corp. has grown more complex and mature in the past few years, I have been alerted to the fact that our operations can benefit from added senior management experience," said Gupta.
Also, the company announced that Max D. Hopper, formerly senior vice president of AMR and chairperson of The SABRE Group, has joined Gupta's board of directors. Hopper served more than 20 years with AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, and helped SABRE expand American Airline's computer system to the world's largest computer reservations system. Gupta Corp., 415-321-9500.
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SunSoft Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) and Persistence Software (San Mateo, Calif.) have agreed to provide object/relational interoperability for networked objects built into SunSoft's Project Distributed Objects Environment (DOE). DOE distributes applications over global networks, and is based on the Object Management Group's CORBA and NeXT Computers' OpenStep. SunSoft will distribute Persistence technology as part of the DOE family of products. Persistence will collaborate with SunSoft to provide integration between DOE networked objects and relational databases, including Sybase, Oracle, CA-Ingres, and Informix.
For a detailed analysis of object-relational DBMSs and tools, watch out for our July cover story. SunSoft Inc., 415-960-3200; Persistence Software, 415-341-7733.
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BMC Software Inc. (Houston) recently unveiled its strategy for managing enterprise computing platforms, called the Cooperative Enterprise Management Strategy (CEMS). As part of this strategy, BMC announced the first two RDBMS administration tools in that line: MetaDesk and MetaManage. Also, BMC will partner with network, database, application development, and hardware vendors to provide solutions within CEMS.
The CEMS initiative is quite possibly a move to compete directly with BMC's nemesis, Platinum Technology (Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.). Platinum has a similar data and systems management strategy -- POEMS -- which Platinum CEO Andrew Filipowski explains in detail in the interview on page 44 of this issue.
DBMS will cover the progress of these initiatives in the coming months. BMC Software, 713-918-8800.
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Software AG (Reston, Va.) recently announced an alliance with MicroStrategy Inc. (Vienna, Va.) to provide end users with data access and multidimensional analysis tools for information stored in data warehouses. Software AG will resell and distribute MicroStrategy's DSS Agent with Esperant -- the key end-user component of its Data Warehouse Initiative. DSS Agent is a metadata-driven tool for developing decision-support applications that includes a multidimensional engine, letting users perform complex analyses against relational databases. Esperant is Software AG's SQL query and reporting tool.
Software AG will bundle Esperant and DSS Agent as an end-user data warehouse access solution. A desktop package of both products is available for $1295. Software AG, 703-860-5050; MicroStrategy Inc., 703-848-8600.
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IBM Corp. (White Plains, N.Y.) announced that it will soon bring its communications technology to the object application development environment, enabling software developers to create, use, and deploy objects across IBM and heterogeneous networks and applications. Collaborative development work across IBM divisions is under way so that customers will be able to use the MQSeries commercial messaging software as a communications backbone for its distributed System Object Model (SOM). IBM is also working with Taligent (Cupertino, Calif.) to submit an asynchronous object messaging model as a Common Facility to the Object Management Group (OMG).
SOM is the framework for IBM's object-oriented products and strategy. Component Integration Laboratories recently adopted it as the foundation for OpenDoc. IBM Corp., 800-426-3333.