Struggling Wang Laboratories is pinning more and more hopes for its future recovery on the potentially huge image processing market, which it first entered back in 1983, and which it claims brought in over $30m of revenue worldwide last year – but sadly, that’s little more than 1% of the total. The latest component, Open/image-Windows is the first to be offered on non-proprietary hardware, in this case MS-DOS machines and IBM PS/2s, and is designed to enable systems developers to include access to scanned image documents within their existing MS-DOS applications. Using Microsoft Windows as a front end, the product is a toolkit based on 175 application programming interfaces which are used to develop imaging applications. Two software packages are currently offered: the Image Development Kit for software developers, and a runtime Windows Cabinet application that provides a functional electronic file cabinet of documents, folders and drawers. Wang is offering the system to third parties, including database vendors such as Gupta Technologies, Focus developer Information Builders Inc, and Oracle Corp, and also to systems houses like Henley Business Systems. Wang will also market the product direct to the market and its own customer base. It can be used across de facto and industry communications standards, and costs from around UKP10,000 for a standalone optical disk based machine, to UKP20,000 for a four user local net system (Wang has a marketing agreement with Banyan Systems for Vines, using the Oracle database). Open/Image-Windows integrates with Wang’s existing Freestyle application, which integrates handwritten annotation and voice synchronisation into image, text and data. However, it can only be tied up to the VS-based Wang Integrated Image System through a client-server configuration at present, although the company hinted that a fully integrated version on open systems hardware was in the pipeline. Wang plans to go after the professions, manufacturing, government and financial services for its own sales.
