Privately-held memory leakage and memory allocation software specialist Geodesic LLC, Chicago, Illinois, is about to announce a deal with IBM Corp under which IBM will bundle Geodesic’s Great Circle software with IBM’s Visual Age C++ applications development tool (CI No 3,395). Geodesic has just released version 3.1 of its Great Circle software, a debugger and memory manager for C and C++, which the company says gives developers flexibility and choice over memory management and garbage collection, rather than forcing automated features on them. Version 3.1 adds an HTML-based graphical interface, to enable memory monitoring and remote debugging. The product is actually a collection of C and C++ debugging libraries which use Geodesic’s patented garbage collection algorithms to automatically find and fix memory leaks not only in application code, but also uniquely, according to the company’s executive vice president sales and marketing Carl Rosenberg, in third party components and legacy code also. This is a particularly important feature, according to Rosenberg, because systems integrators and major corporates can integrate third party applications with impunity now, he says. Great Circle does not change any of the original code, it simply intercepts the memory allocation call and takes over memory management from there. The IBM deal is still pretty much under wraps, and is due to be made public at the beginning of next month. However, it will in some degree mirror the deal the company did with Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sunsoft business unit last November, under which Geodesic is providing Great Circle for Sun to integrate with future C/C++ and Java products. Rosenberg says Sun will have bundled Great Circle with its Visual Workshop by the end of this year, and is likely to put it in its native Java compiler also. While Java currently includes memory management and garbage collection, Geodesic claims Great Circle offers performance increases up to 200 times faster, depending on the task concerned. It therefore offers Java-like productivity with the flexibility of C, Rosenberg says. It runs on a large number of systems, including Windows 95 and NT, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Digital Unix, and AIX. Geodesic was founded in 1992 by Michael Spertus, now the company’s chief technology officer, originally to produce a new object-oriented language. However in the course of development, it created and patented some memory management and garbage collection algorithms, and brought out the first release of its product in 1995. In February last year, it appointed John F Ryan, formerly with Seer Technologies Inc, as its chief executive. The company has just opened offices in the UK to spearhead its drive into Europe, with both a sales office near Macclesfield, Cheshire, and a development office in Cambridge. As well as the IBM and Sun-type deals, the company is also targeting Fortune 2000 companies that build their own mission critical applications. Last year, it turned over around $2m, but it is projecting revenues in the region of $5m-6m this year.
