Pick as an operating system is dead, long live Pick as a database management system. This was the theme at a conference held in London recently by The Open Systems Training Centre which was entitled Pick Directions for the 1990s. This year is a year of anniversaries for Pick: it is celebrating its 25th birthday and was introduced into the UK 10 years ago. How much longer it will survive is a moot issue – estimates range from a decade to forever – the latter prognosis coming from Pick Systems itself. However, it may come as a bit of a surprise to some to discover that members of the Pick community do not fear Unix – on the contrary, their paranoia is reserved for Oracle.

Dominant database

They seem to have swallowed the idea that Unix has won the fight to be the open system operating system, but claim that the real fight is just beginning as to whether Oracle, Ingres, Informix or Pick will be the dominant database management system for Unix. One example of this new attitude came from Geoff Bowerman, European vice-president of Ultimate Corp who said three years ago we couldn’t spell Unix, now we intend to exploit the market acceptance of Unix. To do this Ultimate is offering the database capabilities of Pick with the communications prowess of Unix but says it will not abandon Pick or the Pick marketplace. Bowerman said there is no alternative to this strategy because otherwise Pick will be left in an industry backwater. To this end Ultimate is continuing to develop the Ultimate Pick operating system (there will be two new versions out this year), but it also has Ult/ix, through its alliance with VMark Software Inc, which enables Pick applications to run under Unix and access standard Unix facilities. As well as this it has the Ultimate Virtual Interface (a dataflow channel using Transputer technology from Inmos) with both a Pick/Unix and a Pick/MS-DOS implemen-ation. Bowerman concluded by saying that Pick alone in the nineties will not have the level of development to compete with Unix, but said that Unix will never have the same breadth of applications as Pick. His message was that Pick users had to come to terms with Unix but that they do not have to abandon Pick. Joe Burke, director of software product marketing for Prime Computer Inc, had a similar tale to tell. His scenario was that there will be a bitter and escalating database price war over the next few years which only those companies offering layered software products will survive. Within the database market, Unix will be viewed as a common floor to stand on, users will expect application portability and the database engine will become a commodity product.

By Katy Ring

This is already happening as DEC and IBM bundle their own databases to compete with Oracle, but Burke reckons that IBM and DEC will soon be giving whole development environments away. So where does this leave Pick? As ever Burke cited visibility as one of Pick’s greatest problems, saying that Pick must fight against Oracle, Ingres and Informix to gain market share. To do this, the Pick fraternity must, according to Burke, put aside past rivalries and integrate their products. Only in this way can Pick gain serious database status and user mindshare. As far as Prime is concerned the future Pick growth lies with Pick as multi-user database on personal computers. To this end the Prime Information Pick-based database product is rapidly being developed to be portable to Unix platforms, SQL and related functions are being built into it, as are global dictionaries and a software engineering repository – all of which will be available by the end of 1991. It will soon also be bundled with Novell’s NetWare products, and Prime pledges that it will continue to release a new version of Prime Information every year. The conference was rounded off by the appearance of Stanley Niederberger, director of operations with Pick Systems Europe. He began by saying that if the strength of Pick had been focussed properly from its inception, there would be no Oracle, no Ingres or even an IBM in existence today.

Pick is here to stay, he declared, adding that Pick will not disappear into a Unix shell. To add weight to these statements he produced a list of hardware suppliers queueing up to put Pick on their machines. Aside from having Advanced Pick on Santa Cruz Operation’s 386 offering (CI No 1,355), it is now also on IBM’s AIX RS/6000 (commercial release is set for June) as well as under AT&T’s System V.4. It is being developed to run under AIX/PS/2, and an MS-DOS version is scheduled to emerge in September.

Final irony

According to Niederberger, Pick Systems has signed a letter of intent with DEC to implement Advanced Pick to the VAX and MicroVAX, and developments for Data General and Hewlett-Packard hardware are in the pipeline. Within 12 to 18 months, he claims that Pick will be compared with Oracle and Ingres as a database management system. At the beginning of June Pick Systems will open its Northampton site to cater for both the IBM AIX and the Santa Cruz Unix 386 products. It is also extending its Paris operations to attack the French AIX market. With its new relationships with the Santa Cruz Operation, IBM and AT&T under its belt, Pick Systems’ future is certainly looking a lot healthier. As the International Database Management Association concluded in its recent report on Pick (CI No 1,248) There is already a dedicated core of over a million Pick users out there in the marketplace, users who once they use Pick become zealous converts to this way of computing. There is also an enormous base of Unix users who know nothing of Pick. When, as is inevitable because of the strong thrust towards coexistence of operating systems, the Unix user experiences Pick, many believe allegiances will switch. The Unix devotee could be won over to Pick and the final irony might be that in the long haul, Pick will become the standard in the commercial computing environment, b1cause of that crossover. Could it be that Dick Pick’s one-man crusade to dominate the computer industry is paying off?