If the much-vaunted death of the mainframe had come true, the picture for Gresham Computing Plc, supplier of mainframe utility products and middleware, would have looked decidedly less rosy than it does today. The Southampton, UK company, whose bread and butter is its ICL Plc mainframe business, continues to prosper as the mainframe holds on in there. Gresham saw profits for the year to October up a healthy 31% to 1.1m pounds on revenue up 17% to 9.3m pounds. Chairman Hamish Donaldson said in his report that all divisions of the company continued to perform well. Mainframe utility products continue to make a significant contribution to future revenue and profits he said, while the company is also using its expertise to bring new ‘mainframe class’ utility products to the open systems market. The company has also a newer range of middleware products, all of which rely on the continued existance of the mainframe, and which are doing well, it said. Donaldson says the that company has high hopes for the recently- launched Casablanca, which enables access to mainframe data over the Internet (CI No 2,925). He said he believes the Internet will have increasing importance to Gresham’s customers. The company’s computer personnel operation nearly doubled its profits in the year, and consultancy services had another profitable year with higher margins. Donaldson says that as a small company, the organic growth of around 30% achieved so far is insufficient, and Gresham will be looking to acquire or merge with a complementary business, he said. The company recommends a final dividend of 0.50 pence per share, up 32% on last year.
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