Mention the name Plexus to anyone that has been around a few years, and they will probably say they thought Plexus Computers Inc went out of business. It did, but its XDP image, text and data management software, bought by Dallas, Texas-based Recognition International Inc back in 1989 (CI No 1,233), is alive and well and in bed with Oracle Corp. Recognition and Oracle have got together to develop, market and sell business process re-engingeering systems based on integrated imaging, workflow and database software. As well as jointly developing new pr oducts, they have integrated Recognition’s Plexus XDP software and FloWare, a group workflow product, with Oracle7, to provide imaging and workflow-enabled database applications. XDP combines an application development tool set and an optical disk storage subsystem. It enables developers, in conjunction with standard database management systems, to build document image processing systems on local area network-based hardware such as Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Digital Equipment Corp. FloWare co-ordinates the interaction of a company’s documents, data, tasks and people. It uses Oracle7 to store work-in-progress information. Workflow is designed graphically using a Microsoft Corp Windows-based tool called MapBuilder and can be changed dynamically while work is in progress. For the joint venture, Recognition intended to provide Binary Large Object support for Oracle, as it already does for Informix. The company actually took Informix source code and wrote its Binary Large Object support into that code. Both Informix Corp and Recognition market the resulting product. However, when Recognition wanted to do the same with Oracle it said it found the company’s time-scales too long, and so developed a stand-alone Binary Large Object support product called XDP ObjectServer. The existing XDP optical subsystems storage manager provides juke-box control, disk optimisation and groupings. When combined with ObjectServer, which adds features such as network interfacing and magnetic cacheing, the company has a product that will support Binary Large Object for any database management system. Recognition said its original intention was to create a product to support Oracle only, but had now developed a useful stand-alone tool. It said it was currently talking to Sybase Inc, but that it was too soon to reveal any details.
