Oakland, California-based Forti Software Inc is a start-up trying for the fast track. In the two years since it was formed, it has attracted $6m in venture capital, and another $4m from big-name strategic partners, on the promise that the application development environment it is designing will be a significant enough advance to turn the company into a nine-digit revenue producer. Its unnamed C++-based product, likely to be called Forti something, is scheduled to go into alpha test on Christmas Eve and into beta test in early 1993. Forti says it has lined up a dozen beta sites among Fortune 1000 accounts but cannot identify them publically yet. Its scheme is to produce an object-oriented proprietary language and distributed execution environment to create mission-critical applications distinguishable from others of its ilk by two features. Forti president Martin Sprinzen, once the executive vice-president of international operations at Ingres Corp, described one of these key mechanisms as de-coupling the applications development from the underlying physical environment. Forti applications are developed as a single monolithic application and then subsequently partitioned or automatically broken up to run on various computers within the distributed environment. This way, he says, developers can focus on the business aspects of their applications rather than the details and complexities of the environment, which should be a productivity advance. The fact that it is object-oriented should make it easier for users to move partitioned code around.
Recoding unnecessary
Recoding is unnecessary, improving reliability, the firm says. In its first iteration, the software is to run under VAX/VMS, Unix System Laboratories Inc’s System V.4, Ultrix, Sun Microsystems Inc’s SunOS, IBM Corp AIX, Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX and OSF/1-based servers – with Apple Computer Inc A/UX to follow. Clients are said to run under Motif, Windows 3.1 and Apple Mac System 7. It will also support Novell Inc’s NetWare. Initially it will support Oracle and Sybase relational databases with Ingres, Informix and DB2 coming later. It will also support transaction processing monitors starting with DEC’s ACMS and progressing through to Unix Labs’ Tuxedo, Transarc Corp’s Encina and Top One – probably in that order. The product was designed to run with the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment but Forti has found its Remote Procedure Call slow and incapable of handling the number of messages that the product needs to route. The Distributed Computing Environment implementation has been de-emphasised, it says. Forti expects to sell direct and via OEM customers beginning with its strategic partners, including Sequent Computer Systems Inc and two others that make servers that will support the product.
