Peyman Pouladdej, Computer Associates International Inc’s vice-president of research and development has resigned from the company to start up a new software company with Computer Associates’ co-founder, Bill Habermass, who resigned two years ago. Computer Systems News says that Habermass was responsible for research and development on many of the early products, and he left the company when management refused to pursue his ideas on newer technologies, and chose to develop one architecture for its diverse product lines. Computer Associates’ main competitors are planning to incorporate client-server computing and graphical workstation products in their product portfolios, and Pouladdej says that Computer Associates’ main priority is to focus on existing revenue-generators. His new company, Softblox Inc, is based in Huntington, New York, and it plans to have the first pieces of tools for developing co-operative processing applications by year-end. Focusing on the IBM mainframe, Microsoft Windows and OS/2 environments, the tools will be designed to migrate mainframe applications to distributed computers. Pouladdej says that he is talking with three Fortune 100 companies about collaborations under which Softblox would develop technology in return for funding. Pouladdej also claims that another Computer Associates vice-president is about to defect and come in as the third man, although he remains unidentified at present – third men – and fourth and fifth for that matter – do tend to be like that.
