New York-based Revelation Technologies Inc, developer of personal computer-based application building tools for novice and professional developers, formed in 1987 from the merger of two companies founded in the early eighties, Cosmos and Mainframe Micros, has opened its first European office in Milton Keynes. The company wanted a UK base to service the rapidly growing number of users of its MS-DOS-based application development environment, Advanced Revelation and, perhaps more to the point, to promote the product which, although launched some months ago in the UK, and distributed by Intelligent Computer Services Ltd, still has something of a low profile. The Advanced Revelation product, which sells at around UKP600 for a single-user development system, consists of an applications processor – a set of windows and menu-driven tools for producing applications without coding or programming; a database management system; an active data dictionary – which enables developers to define data fields as they are accessed; Structured Query Language; networking support and Environmental Bonding. Environmental bonding technology provides the ability to develop and operate an application that can read and write to diverse files and database structures located on either personal computers, minicomputers or mainframes without converting, importing or exporting data. Allowing for continual conversion to larger scale applications, the Advanced Revelation product is said to be particularly suited to environments subject to rapid change. The same application can be run using native Advanced Revelation tables, ASCII data, dBase, DBF files or SQL tables residing on a database server. The first bond in a series of planned bonds to database servers, SQL Server Bond, enables Advanced Revelation to link to the Microsoft SQL Server database management system for personal computer networks. Revelation Technologies, which claims to have 200,000 worldwide users of its application development tools at over 2,000 sites, is hoping to establish a strong European support network for its distributors and users – David Inbar, the company’s international vice-president, says that Revelation Technologies is looking to set up offices in France and Germany following the shipping of the French and German translations of the product which the company is scheduling for the beginning of next year. Clive Booth is to head Revelation’s UK operations, having just completed a two-year assignment as managing director of Pegasus Software Ltd. Booth will be appointing other distributors to raise the profile of the Advanced Revelation product and to service the growing value-added-reseller market and provide strong marketing, sales and technical support. Current users of the Advanced Revelation product include the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the NatWest bank subsidiary, Centre-File, and Revelation’s distributor, ICS, has used the product to develop a suite of healthcare products which are marketed by IBM for use in hospitals. Revelation Technologies, which sees Oracle as its main general competitor, feels that it has no real rival in the field of personal computer systems and applications – the capabilities offered with the Advanced Revelation are, David Inbar claims, so close to being unique that there is currently no other product available that presents a serious threat.
