Eponymous object-oriented software development house Forte Software Inc, the Oakland, California company that has won mind-share in the application partitioning world without spending a buck on media advertising, or putting its foot inside a trade show hall, has unveiled version 2.0 of its second-generation environment. The core framework architecture has been extended so that the company’s applications can now be accessed from external tools and services, without the need for custom programming, the company said. Forte Middleware Independent Servers can be accessed from Distributed Computing Environment and Common Object Request Broker Architecture. Support for IBM Corp System Object Model and SunSoft Inc object environments is planned. Forte services can be managed by the Transarc Corp Encina transaction processing monitor (Forte automatically publishes the Forte service as an Encina service managed by the Encina environment). New global name services enable shared services to be referenced across environments.
Window inheritence
Version 2.0 also includes support for OLE 2 so that Object Linking & Embedding applications can work within a Forte window and cross-system window inheritance. There are local language versions based on X/Open Co Ltd National Languages Standard (the Kanji implementation is Forte 1.0) and 2.0 includes the ability to work concurrently in the environment from English, French, German or Kanji front-ends (though Forte has not gone the Unicode route). Additionally, code is now generated, sent for compilation and partitioned from a graphical menu rather than manually. There are new security and performance enhancements for the repository and application libraries that enable developers to modify sections of code without having to recompile the whole applications. The company is putting version 2.0 up on Intel Corp and Digital Equipment Corp Alpha systems running Windows NT for the first time, and it expects this generate a significant share of business over time. It now supports Power Macintosh clients, and adds direct database access to DB2/6000, Microsoft Corp SQL Server and Informix, as well as support for Open Database Connectivity for multiple, but non-direct database connections. OS/2 and Ingres implementations beckon. Version 2.0 ships in the fourth quarter, c osting from $4,000 to $6,000 per developer and $225 per user. There are no upgrade charges. An entry-level configuration would probably start at $75,000, although realistically, Forte said, anyone expecting to spend less than $150,000 – its estimate of the fully-loaded cost of maintaining a C++ program for a year – should be heading for other suppliers. Forte says it will support OpenDoc when that stabilises, because it should make for easier and more portable environments. Although the framework comes with Forte’s own non-Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compatible message plumbing, it also enables other brokers to plug in, and, as soon as it finds a suitable technology, the company said it will strip its own broker, a temporary solution, out of the Forte framework.
By William Fellows
Like personal computers that are pre-loaded with give-away applications that don’t get used, Forte said its quite happy for its own modules, such as transaction processing or systems management services, to be replaced with whatever a customer may have already implemented, such as Encina, or Tivoli Systems Inc technologies. (It has seen no demand yet for Tuxedo or Top End integration). Forte is capitalised at $36m, of which $28m is venture capital, with $8m from hardware partners DEC, Data General Corp, IBM, Sequent Computer Systems Inc and Apple Computer Inc. It has 150 employees. In its first four quarters of shipping revenue product to the end of June it claims to have done $15m (its fiscal year runs March to March), 80% of it in licence sales, and 10% ea ch in consulting and maintenance. It aims to be in the black by March 1996 and reckons that two profitable quarters thereafter should be enough to see i
t to an initial public offering, barring unforeseen circumstances. Less than $1m of the $15m came from its key OEM customer, DEC, though it expects that figure to rise as projects now in the works kick in. Forte claims 100 customers – six in the UK – and now two sites with more than 50 concurrent users, but it said there are four of 1,000-plus user projects under way. It has local operations in the UK and France and eight distributors worldwide, none in the UK, however. It counts Electronic Data Systems Corp and Andersen Consulting as integration partners, although they are not marketing Forte on any kind of exclusive basis.
Acquisition trail
As far as the competition is concerned, the list of independent software vendors now claiming to be object-based application partitioning houses includes Dynasty Technologies Inc, Neuron Data Inc, XVT Software Inc, Uniface BV, Ipsys SA, Progress Software Corp, Texas Instruments Inc, Unify Corp, Open Environment Corp, Seer and the Passport folk to name but a handful. Forte said it has met Seer – probably its closest rival with a similar $75,000 entry-point – a couple of times, and Dynasty on eight or nine occasions, all of which it claims to have won. It knows there’s a marketing issue it needs to address if it is to distinguish itself from the wannabes, but said until now it has been more concerned with building a business than evangelising its technology. It does not want to play the checkbox game that partitioning folk are currently employing against each other, and said its C++ code generation-compilation can’t be touched. With the likes of Taligent Inc and SunSoft C++ development environments bearing down on it, Forte said it will continue to play the middle conceptual ground, sitting between approaches like Taligent, which start with plumbing and move up, and the software engineering operations that start with methodology and work down. Meantime, the company has a bunch of products coming down the pike different from what it has now, that will hang off the framework environment. And Forte is also on the acquisition trail.
