European value-added distributor Edias Software GmbH, Frankfurt, has recently hung out its shingle in Prescott, Arizona, to market Force-5, which it describes as a development environment for creating applications that are portable across operating systems, databases and interfaces. Force-5 originates from the Netherlands firm of the same name, and is based on work that started as Force-3 and Force-4. The developer is able to use graphical tools to put applications together rather than writing code as such. The company says Force-5 uses object techniques – generating its own pseudo-code – to create applications that can, for example, be developed under Windows and run without modification under Unix with Motif, or built on Informix and deployed on Oracle. Force-5 supports Windows, OS/2 Presentation Manager and Motif or Open Look on Santa Cruz Unix, Unix System V, SunOS, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX – Sybase, Oracle, Informix, Ingres and FairCom databases. A Windows evaluation kit which comes with SQL back-end is $90 – development systems are from $2,500 plus $100 for run-times. Edias isn’t sure how a predominantly non-US piece of software will go down in North America, and isn’t making a big deal about Force-5’s lineage. The company, which distributes and supports Santa Cruz Operation Inc, JSB Computer Systems Plc, Century Software Inc and other application software across Europe is part of the World Buying Group, a band of distributors whose mission is to hunt down new software products for its members to market in Europe, the US, Australia and elsewhere. Force-5 is now jointly-owned by Edias and San Juan, Puerto Rico-based Engineering Support Systems Inc. The two contracted Force-5 to bring the environment to product-readiness. Edias will sell and support Force-5 in the US, Europe and other countries, Enterprise Support System will distribute in Central and South America. It has four staff in Prescott.
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