Multi-tier application development shop Passport Corp, Paramus, New Jersey is finally going to put some muscle into raising its profile in the multi-tier application development world. It’s raised $3m from Charles River in a first round of funding which will be spent exclusively on sales and marketing activities and it’s has hired itself a high-profile public relations case to take its story to the media. Passport, which used to call itself InSync Software, believes its business opportunity going forward is the convergence of enterprise and internet-enabled application development and is targeting this market with a new release of its well-regarded Passport toolset which it now calls IntRprise. Actually IntRprise was first announced at the end of last year (CI No 3,066), though no-one seemed to take any notice at the time. IntRprise – or Passport 9.0 if you prefer, though that name is being dropped – now includes the ability to writes applications in the Passport 4GL which can be executed remotely by browser and Java clients. Only the GUI and presentation elements – which IntRprise translates into Java – are passed down to the client, making it well-suited, the company claims, to develop applications that can be deployed across and organization’s entire IT infrastructure. It’s integrated asynchronous messaging technology is Momentum Software Corp’s X*IPC, but says it can support most other messaging technologies where required. It supports concurrent access to most back-end databases and offers a push technology option. Priced at from $9,000, on Windows, NT, VMS and Unix, the company says a real- world installations would start at around $100,000. The company says its main competitor, Forte Software Inc, enforces the use of HTML programming for web-based application development. Although Passport claims to have less than 5% of the overall multi-tier application development market it says it sees less and less of the traditional three-tier players such as Uniface – now owned by Compuware – or Texas Instruments Software, now part of Sterling Software. Passport’s hoping to make a big splash at Informix Software’s forthcoming user conference in San Francisco now that the database company appears to be downplaying its own development tools, or at least courting third parties to support its new Universal Server architecture. Passport claims it did more than $7m revenue in its last financial year and will double that in 1998. It has 60 staff and isn’t profitable. It recently opened an office in Amsterdam and is establishing reseller networks across Europe. It’s signed Lloyd Savage in the UK and Sysdeco in Scandinavia.
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