Almost exactly two years ago, Computergram devoted a whole page to the launch of San Jose, California-based Cooperative Solutions Inc’s Ellipse (CI No 1,926), an all singing, all dancing tool for building, managing, deploying and maintaining client-server applications. It would make translating from your nasty old mainframe to your shiny new client-server enviroment easier than falling off a log. The writer of the piece, Chris Rose, was pretty impressed at the time – and then Cooperative went bust. Well, Ellipse is back but now it’s Bachman Information Systems Inc’s Ellipse. Ellipse was inherited by Burlington, Massachusetts-based Bachman when it took over the bankrupt Cooperative Systems and undertook its debts last November (CI No 2,301). The question is whether Bachman knows what went wrong with Ellipse and what is it going to do to avoid a repetition of history? Cooperative Solutions was founded in 1989 by Kim Worsencroft and Dennis McEvoy, old Tandemers. It was, at its time, the most heavily funded start-up company ever, winning $29m of investment.
Old technology
According to Bernard Dodwell, administrative marketing manager at Bachman Ltd, Ellipse failed the first time round because it was way ahead of its time and not what the market was looking for in the late 1980s, and frankly, the market didn’t know what to do with it. Result – it couldn’t sell enough products to generate working capital and starved to death. Also its pricing structure veered from extremes during the product’s life, starting out over-priced at $100,000 a package, and ending under-priced and lacking any credibility. He now believes that the market is more mature and is ripe for the product to succeed. As to this prediction time only will tell. The need for mission-critical client-server applications is coming but only slowly, and time is not on the side of the ailing Bachman. Steve Brenman, at rival company Forte Software Inc, believes that Ellipse’s problems are more fundamental as it relies on relatively old technology. To his mind, the only way to create a package that enables the design, configuration, management, and in particular the partitioning of applications throughout a client-server environment is through an object-oriented language such as C++ – Ellipse is written in C. Forte’s product has one million lines of C++ code, has taken three years to develop, and is enabled by its object-oriented architecture to offer greater functionality.
By David Johnson
He regards Ellipse as no competition for Forte, since he believes Ellipse can compete only in the local area net departmental system market, and cannot meet the requirements of customers embarking on enterprise-wide migrations. And if the product does succeed, the prices are so low that margins must be very slim, and a second failure is a distinct possibility. However, Bachman is promoting Ellipse as an enterprise-wide package, beyond the parameters of Gupta Corp’s SQL Builder and PowerSoft Corp’s PowerBuilder. Ellipse was created by experienced mainframe developers with a mainframe mentality and mainframe fault-tolerance. Indeed, Bachman feels so little competition from that quarter that it markets the PowerBuilder in the US. Mark Kent, managing director of Bachman UK, believes that as companies begin to deploy client-server systems enterprise-wide, they are finding that early client-focus development tools such as SQL Builder and PowerBuilder, are inadequate to scale beyond departmental applications and that with the addition of Ellipse, Bachman can offer systems for customers at all stages of client-server migration and development. He believes that 80% of the effort in building a client-sever system is spent in actually constructing effective process management wherein the applications operate, rather than in the writing of the actual applications, and Ellipse will help out. The company claims that Ellipse automatically partitions between the client and server, attributing applications to either the client machine or the server, according to a set of parameters in
cluding the amount of data to be used. It also offers full scalability, enabling the support of additional developers, users, sites and servers. Dodwell believes that Ellipse’s lack of object-orientation is not a problem but an advantage, as there are very few production applications that are truly object-oriented and very few people trained to write in C++. Consequently Forte will demand huge amounts of costly retraining and this will prove a big turn-off for potential customers. The new Ellipse is evolution not revolution. It failed last time because it was a revolution, and Dodwell hinted that the steepness of the learning curve that Forte demands might consign it to a similar fate.
Needs a winner
Frankly Bachman needs a winner, because last quarter alone it lost $4.0m, bringing total losses to $9.5m for the nine months on turnover of $25.7m. However, Dodwell is not concerned by the recent poor results, explaining that the massive restructuring with a 15% cut in US personnel and the acquisition of Cooperative Software and WindTunnel Software Inc has repositioned the company to optimise sales of its software engineering tools and the expanding client-server software market. Ellipse is presently being beta tested at 33 sites in the US and Bachman Ltd expects to have a company beta-testing in the UK by the time of the UK launch in September. An entry level special offer price of around ?15,000 will run until the end of the year. This buys a NetWare server repository, one development client and licences for up to five users. This compares most favourably with Forte’s offering at ?75,000 with capacity for five developers, 10 users and a relational database for the objects. The client environment for Ellipse’s development and production is Microsoft Corp’s Windows or IBM Corp’s OS/2 for Windows, connecting over Novell Inc or TCP/IP networks to Sybase Inc’s SQL Server and DB2. Support for Windows NT Advanced Server networks and Oracle Corp databases is also planned. Bachman also plans to combine Ellipse and graphical user interface tools, such as Powersoft’s PowerBuilder and Microsoft Visual Basic.
