Visix Software Inc plans to take the covers off its cross-system application development environment to fatten the company up for an initial public offering down the road. It is creating a new low-end product line for the channel and re-tooling its Galaxy technology for Intranet development. The plan is being executed by a cadre of ex-Sybase Inc executives now running Visix’s day- to-day affairs – including president and chief operating officer Chuck Teubner and marketing director Ben Martindale – who promise to re-launch the company over the next couple of quarters. With 2,000 installations at 420 customers – one third of them independent software vendors – Visix’s Galaxy is regarded as the high-end and high-brow technology provider in the cross-system development space. With so much power, Galaxy is sometimes seen as difficult to use, the company admits. Galaxy Interactive was an early name for what will eventually come to market as a new line of low-price, entry-level offerings that emphasize front-end technology for simple application development. Currently known as Project 11, Galaxy ‘lite’ is being written in Java and will include an object repository for object design, storage and re- use. Visix is currently putting a sales channel together that includes independent software vendor technology partners, integrators and value-added resellers and is ramping its own marketing team accordingly. At the same time, the company also plans to position its Galaxy environment more aggressively towards use by mainstream data processing shops with a 3.0 third quarter release expected to include all of the Internet and Web server components required for Intranet application development. Galaxy 3.0 and Project 11 will get public airings sometime before their release; a preview of 3.0 should find its way out in the next couple of weeks. In addition to those technology partners it already has, including Atria Software Inc and Mercury Interactive Corp, Visix promises other relationships for configuration management, performance tuning and testing functionality. Other Visix technology still in the hangar includes an Object DataBase Connectivity interface for its dbSpectrum database communications suite that provides automatic – as opposed to hand-coded – links to Oracle and Sybase databases. There’s no demand for other links yet, the company says. In other news, Visix has opened a wholly- owned Visix KK subsidiary in Tokyo run by Yasuhiko Mukohata that will support customers of its exclusive distributor there, Osaka Gas Information System Research Institute. Visix has named Ed McLaughlin vice-president of international sales with responsibility for Europe and Asia. He is on board from integrator Acsys, where he was vice-president and general manager for Asia Pacific. Privately-held Visix, which ran up 13 profitable quarters before engineering and increased marketing expenses pushed it into the red, says it will be back at break even this quarter or next, estimating to do 30% more business than the $75m it did in 1995. Visix is doing 30% of its business outside the US now.
