Los Altos, California-based Pure Software Inc has opened European headquarters in Amsterdam. It has also opened sales offices in Reading, Berkshire, Paris and Munich, bringing to 20 the number of staff in Europe. The five-year-old start-up company, now with 130 employees and growing, says the rapid acceptance of its development tools has meant it needs to be able to provide closer support to its customers. There are also plans for an Asian headquarters in Japan. Pure Software has also launched version 2.0 of Quantify, a performance improvement program that can pinpoint potential bottlenecks in code. As a company, Pure Software is fairly exuberant: it has just finished its eleventh profitable quarter, with a turnover last year of $30m, and says its expansion shows no sign of slowing down. It has plans for testing tools and will convert its existing suite of products for Windows95. And it is likely that the company will go public some time this year but it says that given its healthy balance sheet there is no real need. Pure Software’s success is based on technology patented by its founder Reed Hastings, called Object Code Insertion and the basis of its products, all which are designed to improve software quality. The company believes users will no longer accept run-time errors, just as people no longer accept errors in chips. The new version of Quantify enables software developers to compare the run-time version of two pieces of code, so that improvements can be quantified easily.
Code insertion
There is added multi-threaded support for Solaris, Distributed Computing Environment and SunOS. This version will ship in the middle of the month, priced at $1,200 a developer, but there is a minimum order of three. Purify, its first product, acts as a super-fast debugger, detecting and eliminating run-time errors, memory leaks and memory access errors. It does it by inserting code in between each load and store operation; when this expanded program is run, the inserted code can intendify each error and characterise what it is. The program can be used to check sections of code as well as an entire program. PureLink speeds up the time taken to link code, Pure says. Linking from scratch takes as long as other linkers but once the basic linking has been completed PureLink will not go through the entire linking procedure to relink sections of amended code. PureCoverage checks for any untested code, it scrolls directly to an area of code that has not been debugged. Pure Software says this has applications in maintenance work and also when developers link code. To date its products have been available under Solaris, SunOS and HP-UX. Windows95 versions are patiently awaiting Microsoft Corp.
