Question: What happens when you are very early into a market and you pile the functionality into your tool as the market grows? Answer: Other companies follow you in and start nibbling away at your potential market share by offering specialised niche and entry level products. This, it seems is what has happened in the X Window graphical user interface builder market, and VI Corp (Europe), based in Wokingham, Berkshire has appreciated that its DataViews product may be too comprehensive for a lot of potential customers and is responding by introducing entry-level graphical user interface development tools. According to data collated from International Data Corp, Dataquest and CMP Market Research for 1992, the dynamic data visualisation tools market accounts for about 49% of the workstation graphical user inter-face market but is growing at less than 10% a year. Meanwhile, the interactive development tool and user interface management systems sectors account for 47% of the market but are growing at 65% per year. DataViews is very much a player in the more stable market sector, but it needs a stronger presence in more dynamic growth areas. VI Corp has gone about addressing dynamic growth by re-engineering a subset of its DataViews graph components as X-widgets. These are now for sale separately from the DataViews product as Graph Widgets. They can be used with products from other companies such as TeleUSE and UIMX or they can be sold as a package known as DynaGraphX, which is integrated with X-Designer from Imperial Software Technology Ltd, which VI distributes. Naturally, VI would rather sell X-Designer than enhance rival products, but in the US where X-Designer has only been sold for the past year, rival products have a much stronger hold and the separation of the Graph Widgets enables a toehold into these accounts for the VI sales force. DynaGraphX provides eight types of graph widgets capable of generating 40 real time display formats and automatic C code generation, courtesy of CenterLine Inc’s CodeCenter C. The development licence for this package is UKP4,600 with maintenance. A development licence for the Graph Widgets costs UKP3,000.
