San Francisco-based Centerview Software Inc’s impending tie-up with Princeton, New Jersey-based data modeling company Logic Works Inc will result in a bundled product family featuring Centerview’s recently announced Data Director 2.0 Visual Basic application development environment, (formerly Choreo) and Data Neighborhood database communications tools, plus Logic Works’s SQL-based desktop database modeling tool, Erwin Entity-Relationship Modeling for Windows. Software watchers say Centerview has created Data Director by extracting and abstracting the most popular feature in Powerbuilder, the DataWindow, and making it available for Visual Basic. The DataWindow enables developers to work with database tables in Oracle, Informix, and other relational databases. Centerview president and chief executive Mark Douglas says that is too simplistic a view of what it is trying to achieve long-term – a full-blown component software environment – but admits it is a useful shorthand to describe what is there now. He says the Centerview product will evolve during 1997 into a decision support tool providing data access from anywhere, and not just from a Data Window. Douglas agrees the bundling deal will be important for Logic Works given that Powersoft Corp ended its bundling arrangement with the company following parent Sybase Inc’s acquisition of the competing S-Designor product. It will give Logic Works a stronger Visual Basic business. Douglas says although Centerview could do with out Powerbuilder, the Logic Works relationship will provide it with an important route into big accounts with large data models. Douglas says that other bundling deals are on the way.
