As the process of transforming itself into a tools company is now in full flight, Unify Corp will soon pitch itself into the market for so-called second generation application development environments, unveiling a release of its Vision proprietary language. The second release of the environment is not called version 2.0, because Sacramento, California-based Unify says this version and all future releases will essentially be enhancements to the base technology and will be offered free of charge to existing licensees. Unify says it has some 3,000 at 200 customer sites with a dozen second generation applications actually in use. With Vision 4GL 2, as it is recognised internally, Unify will be up against the likes of Forte Software Inc and Dynasty Technology Inc, the only systems that in its eyes can legitimately claim to provide a full range of second generation application development technologies such as scaling to large numbers of users, distributing parts of the application to different nodes for processing, modularity, object-oriented, support for management tools as well as development and cross-system support. Unify says its new release, which comes almost a year after it initial offering, includes what it describes as a scalable rapid application development and deployment environment. The environment includes built in application and transaction models as well as an object programming environment. Partitioning and network communication is configured by a single tool, and application processing happens transparently once these have been applied. Unify says a single copy of an application created under Vision on a network can be used by attached Unix, Windows and Macintosh clients without recompiling code. It comes with its own repository and Open application programming interfaces for developers, application programming interfaces that are open to independent software vendors for development. It runs in conjunction with the full range of databases and uses Unify’s own federated naming service messaging application programming interface, with support promised for Tuxedo by mid-1995, Distributed Computing Environment, CICS and Encina thereafter. It is also talking to Tivoli Systems Inc about support for Vision objects under Tivoli’s distributed management applications. It uses Intersolv and PVCS for version control and is talking to other players. Privately-held Unify did some $13.5m in licence revenues to Unix versions of its U2000 database last year, down 10% on 1992, a 1.4% market share, $16.5m on tools, up 37.5%, with a 3.1% market share, and $10m on other licences, according to International Data Corp’s figures. Vision 2 will ship next quarter: $5,000 for a single development licence; $25,000 buys five development and 10 deployment licences.
