Applications development tools company Visix Software Inc is being dissolved after months of uncertainty over the company’s future. Doubts first surfaced last year, when the Reston, Virginia-based company lost its chief executive officer of only one year, Gene Bedell (CI No 3,281). Five key software engineers also left to join competitor New Moon Software Inc. Visix denied it was in trouble at the time, but earlier this year things went very quiet at the company, and support services were withdrawn, leading to rumors of the company’s demise on internet news groups. Phones are no longer being answered at the company, and the web site is down. Barry Libenson, who took over as CEO from Bedell last November, was quoted in press reports as saying that Visix’s board of directors had decided to dissolve the company, which had around 70 employees. By March this had been reduced to only 13, said reports. Visix was formed in 1989 as a buy-out from American Management Systems under the leadership of Jay Wettlaufer. Its first product was Looking Glass, a graphical front-end to Unix, but as that business faded away, Visix invested something like $20m on the development of Galaxy, a full-blown cross-platform application development environment, launched in 1992. For a number of years the company consistently turned over more than $15m, without ever quite attaining the sustained growth that would enable it to go public. In 1996, ex Sybase senior VP Chuck Teubner took over the helm from Wettlaufer, in order to add some marketing strength to what was primarily a technology company. But in quick succession Teubner was succeeded by Bill Nelson, and then by Gene Bedell, the founder of Seer Technologies Inc. Last year, Visix launched its first Java development tool, Vibe. But increasing competition and the popularity of cheaper Java-based tools made the company’s full-scale products too expensive. Vibe, written in the early days of Java -when it was still called Oak – retains proprietary elements from Galaxy. Users such as AT&T Co, Bellcore, J.P. Morgan, NASA and Xerox Corp are now said to be considering their options – though some are thought to have already negotiated rights to the Galaxy source code. Unify Corp used Galaxy for the development of its own Vision and Vision Web products, but hadn’t contacted us by press time to let us know how it would be affected.
