There’s been a coup d’etat at loss-making database company Sybase. The ringleaders hail from its largest subsidiary Powersoft, which has now got its mitts on Sybase’s internal structure and marketing plans. Susan Amos from our sister publication, Software Futures donned a flak jacket at last month’s Powersoft User Group conference in Paris.
Something’s going down in Emeryville, California. Sybase has been infiltrated by key staff at its client/server tools subsidiary Powersoft, for which it laid out the hefty sum of $875m in December 1994, and saved the tool that couldn’t scale from early retirement. The first infiltrator was Mitch Kertzman, co-founder of Powersoft, shooting up from executive vice president of sales and marketing at Sybase to take the presidential top spot, chief executive officer. Now David Litwack’s time has come. Thanks to the departure of Sybase’s Dennis McEvoy, to text search engine supplier Verity of Sunnyvale, California. Litwack, former Powersoft president, has found himself catapulted to fame as executive vice president products at Sybase. Indeed the takeover is so blatant that ‘Who bought who?’ is the joke going round the industry at the moment. We teased Litwack about the Powersoft tail wagging the Sybase dog. To which he astutely points out you could just as easily say Watcom is wagging Powersoft. This, he explains, is because Dave Boswell, formerly in charge of the low- end relational database Watcom, renamed SQL Anywhere, is now vice president of Powersoft’s development tools division. Canadian desktop database company Watcom, of Waterloo, Ontario, was snapped up by Powersoft in November 1993, before they both got gobbled up by Sybase. The joke doesn’t fit with the revenue pie though, Litwack explains. Powersoft tools sales lag behind Sybase’s SQL Server relational database management system (RDBMS) business. Tools only account for 25% to 30% of the company’s total revenues. The rest of the dollars come from 1,400 consultants worldwide who account for a surprisingly substantial 25% of revenue and enterprise business. This is a coverall term for database SQL Server, middleware Enterprise Connect and query tool Sybase IQ Accelerator. This enterprise business category fills out a hefty 45% chunk of the pie chart.
SO HOW COME POWERSOFT TAKES OVER SYBASE?
The reason Sybase is suddenly being overrun by Kertzman’s crew is that it doesn’t know how to market its wares – a topic we’ve often raised in these very pages. Sybase’s done a poor job of explaining its technology to the marketplace, says Litwack. Gems like Enterprise Connect have been eclipsed by the database – at Sybase everything, database and middleware is lumped together into enterprise business. And you shouldn’t try to manage a product with a 100% growth rate like SQL Anywhere in the same way as products with a lower growth rate, like Replication Server. His plans are to run each product line as a distinct business, independent of the database. Up until now 70% of middleware sales have been limited to Sybase’s SQL Server database customers. Most revenue has been moving data from SQL Server to SQL Server, not anything to anything. The products need to be packaged as independent businesses with a business manager in charge, responsible for marketing and profit and loss. They will own the product – that’s Mitch’s goal, says Litwack. This will bring the rest of the company into line with Powersoft, which is already demarcated into development tools, design tools, languages and desktop database products. Reorganization aside, we reckon it must be pretty frustrating having the Powersoft trailer hitched to the Sybase wagon, plummeting, as it is, off the edge of the cliff. The combined company lost $25m in its second quarter, ending June 30th 1996, and is shedding around 700 of its 6,100 strong workforce. This followed on from a dismal first quarter loss of $6.9m. But Litwack seems undeterred. Sybase and Powersoft keep separate internal profit and loss accounts. Powersoft, brags Litwack, has not lost any of its staff, is growing in revenueand is profitable (that is, it would be if it wasn’t owned by someone making a loss!) So does it not niggle him that his parent company can’t get it together? Certainly we would prefer it not to be that way, is the most you can drag out of him. For Litwack, it must seem like history is repeating itself. He compares Sybase’s blues with the crisis that hit his old mainframe database company, Cullinet software Inc, back in the late ’80s. Everything Cullinet had was dependent on the database and tied to mainframes. The company and its database fell victim to the great acquisitor, Computer Associates, and is now languishing in a dusty store cupboard at said company. So does this mean SQL Server is about to get sucked up into the CA database hoover to join Cullinet’s IDMS, Applied Data Research’s Datacom, and the OpenIngres relational database formerly owned by The ASK Group – not to mention a few others that CA has the source code to? No, says Litwack, as Sybase has more standalone products. Its market is healthy, it’s not tied to a declining hardware platform. Somewhat leery of his reply, we quizzed the great acquisitor itself. Are you going to buy Sybase? CA’s marketing director Jay Huff, based out of Slough, UK laughs off the rumors: We never comment on acquisitions. But Charles Wang has said recently that we’re not really interested in another database. And CA is not the only vulture that has been seen circling in Sybase’s vicinity. IBM is reputedly interested too, although we fail to see how the company would pacify the engineers in its own stalwart DB/2 database division. While acquisition must be at the forefront of his mind, Litwack does a good job of hiding it, and fires up a PowerPoint presentation on the company’s flashy new Web tool NetImpact Studio. As a stopgap until Powersoft’s Intranet development tool NetImpact Studio appears, you can opt for a quick fix, web.pb, to run your current PowerBuilder app on a Web server
NETIMPACT STUDIO THE WEB FACE PAINTER
Now that the Web is the tick in the box needed to get you onto a customer’s tools shortlist, Powersoft is busy preparing a me-too graphical user interface painter for the Web, NetImpact Studio (NIS). The company had to come out with something to keep up with the Joneses. Borland is set to wheel out IntraBuilder sometime this fall and Microsoft has Internet Studio, due into beta in the fourth quarter of this year. NetImpact Studio has been announced way ahead of its beta release, penciled in for the end of the year, as the company wanted to put its stake in the ground in a soon-to-be-crowded market. Litwack thinks Powersoft can see off the rest of the pack. People think when we started up with PowerBuilder that we had the market to ourselves. But we didn’t. Remember ObjectView from KnowledgeWare? [which then disappeared down the gullet of Sterling Software and was never heard of again] Remember SQLWindows from Gupta? [the company is now trying its luck as the renamed Centura] We don’t see any of those any more. NIS is billed, like the rest of them, as a tool to make HyperText Markup Language (HTML) easy. With it you can create tables and forms graphically – to resize a column or merge cells, you just click with a mouse. If you are masochistic enough to want to modify HTML manually, there is a text editor. You can even plunder graphics from other people’s Web sites via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There is also a test browser and personal Web server to run on a PC, so you can make sure all the links work. Code gets stored in ObjectCycle, Powersoft’s server- based object management repository, which has sprouted up from the ruins of Sybase’s abortive graphical object-oriented application development tool, BuildMomentum.
HOW HIGH CAN NETIMPACT JUMP – BYE BYE POWERBUILDER?
If you push the company on just how far up the food chain NIS will travel, you find out NIS is gonna stay in the area of read only, information publishing. Its pretty screens will hook in to databases to create that all-important dynamic Web site, but transactions will be out of bounds, concedes Powersoft’s Boswell. So if you were wondering whether you could chuck PowerBuilder away and pile all your eggs in the NIS basket, the answer is no. You still need PowerBuilder to develop your application logic. NetImpact Studio does not allow you to develop an application server, that’s where you use PowerBuilder or Optima++ [the company’s graphical C++ programming tool], confirms Litwack. The two tools will be sold as complementary offerings. In fact, the company hopes to shift quite a few units of a PowerBuilder/NetImpact Studio bundle. Litwack says the company could have brought out a version of PowerBuilder for the Internet, but decided to come out with an all new tool, rather than simply adding features to PowerBuilder. He denies that it is the end of the line for PowerBuilder though. Version 5.0 of PowerBuilder can partition logic between the client and the server, which is not all that different to what you need to do for the Web, he claims. And anyway, long before there will be pure Web applications, there’ll be hybrid ones, like the company’s own patch tracking app. Customers who’ve requested a bug fix can get a patch number from technical support at PowerBuilder, and then track the progress of the work over the Web.
WHAT IF YOU WANNA GO WEB NOW?
It’s easy to ‘ooh and ah’ in wonderment as Powersoft’s Internet ambassador, Bob Tierney builds a form without even mentioning the word HTML, but let us not forget that the tool’s still stuck on the overhead projector. (Jibing at his off-the-wall job title, Tierney jokes: If things go wrong I have diplomatic immunity.) If you want to take your chances with a Powersoft solution that’s out there now but has not been designed from the ground up for the Web, you can buy Web.pb. It is a $99 add-on to PowerBuilder 5.0, to magically make it Internet-enabled. If you install it onto your server, it tells an app you’ve already prepared earlier how to dynamically generate HTML pages on the fly, which are then sent out to somebody’s Web browser on the other side of the planet, or, more probably on the other side of the room. Whether it could cope with thousands of sporadic hits from Web browsers around the world, well, that’s the million dollar question. Or, Powersoft’s own home page encourages you to make use of the Internet features already plumbed into Version 5.0 of PowerBuilder. Like support for Microsoft’s ActiveX component technology, which means you can embed a Web browser into a PowerBuilder app. The browser you can embed is WebViewer ActiveX, from the catalogue of Visual Components, the, Lenexa, Kansas- based company that Sybase acquired this January. Or, you can turn the above example inside out and run a PowerBuilder application in a Netscape browser, by building a mini-app, or PowerBuilder DataWindow Plug-in. The only catch is, you have to install the PowerBuilder runtime Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) on an end user’s PC – which surely defeats the object of running an application via a Web browser, ie, to free the PC from the shackles of proprietary software. And let’s not forget that later this year Optima++ will be able to generate Java code. So, let’s tot that all up. That makes three current options for the PowerBuilder community to make use of the Web, and two still in the oven. We know it’s good to give the customer choice, but this sure looks like Powersoft can’t make its mind up which way to jump. It seems like the company’s desperately trying to have something available to cover any and every possible future scenario. We spent the whole user conference asking ourselves what tool you should use for what, because no one spokesperson can give you an overview of the whole tool range. There’s a communications gulf between the PowerBuilder, the NetImpact Studio and the Optima++ teams, and Litwack’s comments re hybrid versus pure web applications smack of having to pacify the lot of them.
WHO CARES ABOUT NETIMPACT STUDIO?
We were not the only ones scratching our heads. So was PowerBuilder user, Glenn Coward, development manager at real estate asset management organization, Archon, owned by investment firm Goldman Sachs. The company hails from Irving, Texas and manages $3bn of real estate. It was formerly called JE Robert Companies until bought out by Goldman Sachs earlier this year. PowerBuilder has up until now been the company’s development tool of choice running against an Oracle 7.1 database. Now Coward is putting in an Intranet to run Human Resource applications, covering functions such as timesheet submission. He thinks NetImpact Studio looks great but he needs it yesterday, as he has got to the testing stage already with his application. Powersoft has lost out to Microsoft here, as Coward has roped together a bunch of tools from Microsoft that he says give him most of what NIS is supposed to do in the future. The tools he uses are Distributed Visual Basic, Internet Information Server (IIS) and VBScript. He also plans to use Microsoft’s J++ (codenamed Jakarta) when it’s released. The combination of Microsoft’s Internet Server and Distributed Visual Basic means you can have remote VB objects accessing a database, so you don’t have to do any Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) coding in C++ for access to the database. Coward uses a combination of VBScript and ActiveX controls to do the browser interface, with plans to integrate Java applets eventually. If you ask why he didn’t consider using any of the PowerBuilder options, he explains that Web.pb has only just started shipping, and anyway, Powersoft could not provide much information about the product. Optima++ was rejected too: Powersoft’s gonna put Java into Optima++ in the future, but it’s not in there yet. What swung his decision massively to VB and Internet Information Server was Microsoft’s ActiveX framework. We can create a client/server application with distributed VB. Then you can run the client piece of the application through VBNet to convert it to VBScript and HTML. It will then run in Internet Explorer 3.0. The distributed portion of the application is an OLE object, so it could be replaced with a Delphi or PowerBuilder object later on.
EUROPE TRAILS THE US
Has anybody else looked at NetImpact Studio, we wondered? SC Johnson Wax is a multinational supplier of household cleaning products, spread over 48 countries. Tony Speed is the European IS manager based out of Egham, UK. His job is to look at new technology and support existing software. He went along to Powersoft’s user conference in Paris, France to keep an eye on product directions. The company is a new PowerBuilder user. Speed is developing a pilot application to provide European country managers with sales and management reports. It will go out to 20 users initially, and will run on a central server. Reports will be emailed out via Hewlett-Packard’s OpenMail product over the company’s own private network, made up of leased lines. NetImpact Studio looked like a very interesting product, says Speed. The visual approach and ease of use is good. But it’s not something we’re looking to use today. Speed has not kept tabs on what other vendors like Borland and Microsoft have to offer, as this area of technology is far ahead of what SC Johnson needs to do at the moment. Kitting yourself out for the Net is an infrastructure issue, not a one-off point purchase. The corporation is currently looking at how it should best use the Internet. For now I’m not aware of a great desire to extend Web capabilities to users, he states. On the PowerBuilder front he likes the fact that Powersoft is trying to maintain an open environment, giving native access to more databases than just Sybase. This was an initial fear voiced by many Powersoft users at the time of the acquisition, which, as yet, hasn’t come true.
THUMBS UP FROM NEW JERSEY
One New Jersey user thinks NetImpact Studio is gonna be the tool for building Intranets. Rik Brooks has built up an eight person consultancy, Byte Inc, based in Palmyra with customers like Prudential Insurance. Brooks and PowerBuilder go back a long way – he was one of the original beta testers of PowerBuilder 1.0 and is now on an elite mailing list of NetImpact Studio white papers. Byte has written a security product for PowerBuilder applications, which provides row and column level locking for Sybase and Oracle databases. Hmm. Interesting then that Sybase itself has yet to crack the row level locking nut for its own SQL Server database, meaning that it still can’t run applications like SAP’s R/3 suite optimally. Brooks says Intranets are the talk of the town. I haven’t got a single client that’s not intimately concerned about the topic. NetImpact Studio will simplify development. An Intranet is a little bit different from just a Web site, you have to have applications running in a browser. Brooks compares NIS to what Java tries to do, that is, run across many platforms. Right now I use Java, but NetImpact Studio will conceptually be able to do the same thing. It will provide a wrapper for the server, generating HTML files to view through every type of browser. A big plus point in favor of NIS, he feels, is that it supports both ActiveX and Java, so if Microsoft loses out to Sun in the battle of the Web giants, you won’t have to change the environment, just the objects.
CONCLUSION: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!
Powersoft is all too ready to point out Sybase’s faults, oblivious to the glaring faux pas in its own public declarations. The irony of straitjacketing Sybase into separate product lines is that the new divisions will probably end up not talking to each other, just like Powersoft’s squabbling tools teams. While we congratulate Litwack on his promotion to the Sybase flagship, we’d like to remind him of his duty to the rest of the fleet. It’s about time Powersoft took a long hard look at each and every tool in the warehouse and came up with a clear message of what the customer should buy for what purpose. Perhaps once Powersoft has completed sorting out Sybase to its satisfaction, it will finally have time to get its own house in order. Let’s hope it begins with its Web tools strategy.
