Seer Technologies Inc, Cary, North Carolina is in the final throes of obtaining one of the gran’daddys of application partitioning, Ellipse, Bachman Information System Inc’s application development environment. But will anyone notice? Senior vice-president for business development at Seer, Andrei Boisvert says Seer will take over Ellipse’s installed base and flip it over to its own HPS High Productivity System development environment over time. Although Seer may make use of some of the technology in the future, Boisvert advises that Ellipse is effectively dead in the water. At least part of the reason Seer is grabbing Ellipse is to keep it from falling into enemy hands, although publicly the company will say only that Ellipse gives it the chance to get into more client-server sites. Bachman, which has been bleeding money for some time, says that it sold Ellipse because the tool is no longer part of its core business, and it intends to concentrate its efforts on modelling, database design, predicative performance analysis and process management products including Bachman/Analyst, Bachman/DBA, Groundworks and Terrain. Bachman says it’s much more interested in selling its software engineering tools in the data warehouse arena – and is now in the throes of acquiring Cadre Technologies Inc (CI No 2,810).
Fashionable technology
Sources claim Bachman has only won 33 Ellipse accounts worldwide. Supposedly one of the first of the so-called second generation application development tools boasting application partitioning – the fashionable technology more recently favoured by the likes of Forte Software Inc, Dynasty Technologies Inc, Neuron Data Inc, Ipsys Inc, Unisys Corp, Open Environment Corp, Uniface BV, Unify Corp, Passport Inc and countless other wannabes – Ellipse started life at San Jose, California-based Cooperative Solutions Inc, a 1989 start-up founded by Kim Worsencroft and Dennis McEvoy. Cooperative was a heavily funded start-up, with $29m to get it off the ground, and McEvoy – now a Sybase senior vice-president – prophesied that by the mid-1990s, application partitioning would be de rigueur in the client-server environment. However the road from the late 1980s to the present day proved to a journey to far and in November 1993 Cooperative went bust. Bachman took over Ellipse and Cooperative’s debts, promising the market had matured enough for an application partitioning solution to the excessive processing bottlenecks on the client to which client-server systems were subject. Bachman claimed that Ellipse automatically partitioned between the client and the server according to a set of parameters, including the amount of data that should be used, and countered criticism from young pretenders like Forte that Ellipse suffered from a lack of object architecture by arguing that the C++ code of Forte’s system was difficult to learn, demanding costly training, with very few people trained to write in C++. Privately, commentators suggest that at least part of Ellipse’s problem was due to its poor marketing. High Productivity System by contrast began life in the 1980s as an in-house development at the First Boston Corp between it and IBM, with Seer Technologies being founded in 1990. HPS aims to be a complete client-server system and comprises more than just standard software engineering features. The HPS development environment is centred around its own repository, requiring DB2 and based on IBM mainframes, with development on OS/2 servers. The tool set addresses all parts of the software development lifecycle, divided into four types: tools supporting definition and analysis activities – software engineering, tools supporting prototyping, software construction and application delivery tools.
