UK fourth-generation language company Cyberscience Plc, of Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, has spent the last three years making its transition from proprietary Data General Corp technology over to open systems, and now reports that the majority of its sales are for Unix-based systems. Its second biggest market is for Digital Equipment Corp VAX/VMS. Cyberscience, an 85-employee company with $14m to $15m annual turnover – it likes to quote its figures in dollars – and not publically quoted, has subsidiary operations in Denver, Colorado and Sydney, Australia. It now concentrates on reference versions of its proprietary language technology for the major chip systems rather than on specific machines, but of late has been winning downsizing contracts on Hewlett-Packard Co, Sequent Computer Systems Inc and Pyramid Technology Corp hardware. The language runs on top of multiple databases, including Oracle, Informix, Ingres and Sybase, as well as the Cobol-based flat file systems that still act as a base for the majority of installations out there. Customers tend to use the product either as a report generator for existing, often highly complex databases brought down from the mainframe, or as a tool for the complete re-engineering of their applications, including prototyping. Cyberscience spokesman Justin Wright claims that the difference in the market this year is that high-end Unix machines are finally being sold. The high-end has now been legitimised. He claims, however, that few customers are dabbling with transaction processing monitors. It can just add a whole level of complexity and extra load, he commented.
