Software development company Visix Software Inc is denying its business is in trouble following the defection of five senior software engineers over to New Moon Software Inc, a Santa Clara, California-based thin client software house. The move coincides with the departure of the firm’s chief executive officer, Gene Bedell, who only joined the company just over a year ago, after six years heading Seer Technologies Inc, which he founded. He’s gone to set up a new management consultancy firm, and Barry Libenson, previously vice president of business development, takeS over. The five engineers who’ve gone to New Moon were senior engineers who’ve all been working on the cross-platform engineering that Visix has been building into its product. Specifically, the team were responsible for designing and building the Visix Galaxy portable windows library, and the Vibe Java interface development environment tool. New Moon’s Liftoff product, expected out earlier this year (CI No 3,212) but now due by the end of the year, is said to convert PCs running Windows 95 or NT into thin client network computers by partitioning and distributing applications across client devices and NT servers. It says the Visix expertise will enable it to focus in on Windows CE, Java and other clients without losing time getting its core Windows 95 technology onto the market. The engineers will continue to work in Visix’s town of Reston, Virginia. Visix claims it’s not surprised the five went New Moon is a start-up much like Visix was, said Katherine Johnson, the Visix spokeswoman, who also pointed out that Randy Dieter, senior vice president of engineering at New Moon, was an ex-Visix employee. Visix has some 70 staff, and this week ships the first production copies of Galaxy 3.0, the latest version of its development tools for Solaris, Windows NT and C++. The new version adds distributed application services and database functions to Galaxy, expected to be launched in two weeks time.
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