Gresham Telecomputing Plc, which yesterday released its first full year figures since the merger of the Gresham Group with Telecomputing Plc in 1991 (CI No 1,620) is betting its future on the market’s movement towards open systems, despite the fact that its revenues still come from traditional ICL mainframe customers. Gresham chairman Sid Green professed himself modestly satisfied with the company’s pre-tax profit of UKP767,000 on sales of UKP7.25m – last year’s sales were UKP6.29m but the two companies had been combined for only part of the accounting period. Exceptional items of UKP236,000 related to the merger, and doubled research and development expenditure of UKP801,000 also affected profitability. The share prices rose to 57 pence on the news, giving Gresham a market capitalisation of some UKP17m. DataServe, a remote procedure call client-server product to connect ICL mainframes running VME to other VME or Unix-based systems, is the company’s most significant seller: VMS and Windows versions have been announced but are not yet shipping. ISAM-XA, an X/Open-compliant resource manager for those wishing to access transaction processing monitors from data held in indexed sequential file systems – despite all the noise, relational still accounts for only 10% of data – is held to be the brightest hope for the future. It’s only competitor comes from Informix Corp. ICL has already agreed to take the product, while Olivetti, Bull, DEC, NCR and others are evaluating it. And TP+, Gresham’s transaction processing technology said to be complementary to teleprocessing managers such as Tuxedo, Top-End and Encina, has been integrated into Dun & Bradstreet financial accounting software which is now beginning to ship. Gresham says it is working on similar deals and will also begin marketing the product itself to open systems transaction processing users. Southampton-based Gresham employs just over 90 staff. Green says he is carefully controlling costs, but doesn’t rule out organic growth through acquisition if the opportunity is right. But with the increased emphasis on downsizing and open systems, he is expecting the market to grow steadily this year and we’ll grow with it.
