By the turn of the century, the clientserver systems market will be worth between $2,000m and $3,000m, and still centred on the personal computer, according to Gupta Technologies Inc’s chairman and chief executive, Umang Gupta. Speaking at a meeting of the Client Server Group, he made clear that this prediction will form the basis for the company’s strategy in the future which is fortuitous since this is where it has concentrated in the past – building on the existing 30% to 35% market share to which it lays claim. Indeed the Menlo Park, California company rules out any products for the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh in the next two years – although Gupta says that perhaps the company will produce something after 1995 – saying that he perceives a need to focus on the Windows market. Having said that, Gupta also commented that multiple environment support would become increasingly important, believing that it will be incumbent on anyone in the tools business to cover more than Windows; specifically, an NT version of SQL Windows should be launched next year, possibly OS/2 Presentation Manager support following, IBM toolkits permitting. Similarly, he says that the next version of SQL Base will be put up under OS/2 version 2.0, NT, Univel and Solaris, while SQL Network will connect to all popular SQL database management systems. Also, he drew attention to the fact that client-server systems are predominantly used in large businesses at present: this he attributes to the fact that it is mainly used by programmers, and they tend to be in large corporations. Nonetheless Gupta believes that this situation will change, and that client-server will become a small to medium-sized business phenomenon. At the meeting, Gupta also revealed that, although the company is not announcing delivery dates, SQL Windows 4.0 has just gone into beta testing.
