XDB Systems Inc is embarking on a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to win business in the client-server environment. And the Laurel, Maryland company is armed to achieve this goal with an expanded European marketing team, new products and a planned French subsidiary. XDB is a relational database and tools developer specialising, not suprisingly given the name, in IBM Corp’s DB2; it says its goal is to deliver the most powerful database engine for the development and production of enterprise wide client-server applications and it claims 100% compatibility with DB2. XDB wants to move away from what it sees as its niche market to offering database systems for lower and middle end of the client-server market. In that arena it will be competing against the likes of Gupta Corp. XDB already had a UK subsidiary in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, which it opened in November 1992 (CI No 2,044). That now becomes the European headquarters and will headed by Graham Smith, formerly director of international channels at Intersolv Inc. The Chesham office was established to service Europe but earlier this year, in a response to good business, it opened an office in Munich, Germany. Staff in Germany and England has been doubled. In spring it set up an international distribution organisation and by the end of this year, a Parisian office will have been established. It is expanding its technical support as well. XDB says it will have the edge over rivals as it offers an extremely compact code size which needs little memory and works quickly. It is shipping version 4 of its XDB-Server, a 32-bit database engine designed to bring some of the power and security of mainframe systems to personal computer-based development. Enhancements in XDB-Server v.4 are index walking and coverage that avoids base table access when an index query will suffice; transparent access to data controlled by other XDB servers in a distributed environment; increased security; and more control for the administrator. It works with a variety of front ends. XDB has also launched XDB-DRDA Server, which it claims is the first Distributed Relational Database Architecture server for client-server environments. It resides on the server and enables mainframe-based applications to initiate dialogue with data stored on any XDB-Server database running on a local area network, personal computer or mobile computer, using the DRDA protocol. The company says the value of this system is that information system managers can concentrate on security and data integrity management, while end users have easy access to data they need. The XDB-DRDA Server comes with the XDB-Link application Server which enables developers to access remote data using SQL requests. XDB Systems is still privately owned; last year turnover was $13m, this year it is expected to be around $17m. Around 70% of its business comes from the US, the rest from the European market.
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