After ten years in the business, Dutch 4GL company Four Seasons Software BV’s has decided it’s had enough of being just another one of the 22 or more purveyors of application development tools – the one with the Euro-centric focus – and is about to put some wind in its sails. It’s changing the name of the company to SuperNova Inc, also its flagship product, refocusing its sales effort on the US market, breaking apart its 4GL into standalone component modules, and setting itself some ambitious performance targets. Why? Well for a start it hasn’t capitalised on its claim to have been the first company to provide application partitioning – since 1991 – nor spent enough time trumpeting its cross-platform capabilities. And with the $5m it’s had in its pocket since late last year courtesy of Dutch venture capitalist Gilde Investment Funds (CI No 2,972), it’s putting into action a plan to double the number of SuperNova licensees to 100,000 by the end of the year. The spreadsheet says it could do $16m revenue this year if it meets its target – 40% of that business in the US through a fresh set of partners, up from around 17% now – and between $25m and $30m in 1998 bringing it to IPO readiness. The privately-held company says it did $10m in 1996. The problem SuperNova says it can solve is sorting through a company’s entire collection of legacy applications and tying their data sources into modern object-based applications that run under Windows. The Enterprise, Classic and Desktop versions of the 4GL have been poured back into one pot and are being re-brewed as separate components. SuperNova Application Developer is where the guts of the technology live, Decision Query is its existing reporting tool. New this week is Visual Concepts, a Corba-based integration architecture which it says can wrap, re-write or convert legacy and new application modules into components that can be manipulated into complete applications as Java, Delphi, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, C++ or ActiveX objects. Still to come is a performance management and software distribution tool called Control Center for deploying applications across multiple servers plus a slew of ready-to-use third party components it’s pulling together as Business Components. It’s even componentizing its own financial package into modules for use with Visual Concepts. SuperNova is a through-and-through Corba shop, having built its own object request broker used by its 4GL, although it also supports BEA Systems Inc’s DEC ObjectBroker with support for Iona Technologies Ltd’s Orbix coming. SuperNova claims to support 28 different databases running on 34 operating systems. The company has around 100 employees and a US headquarters in Edison, New jersey. It claims to be bringing a heavyweight partner to its table in the next few weeks.
