In a way it is unsurprising that Sheffield is the Pick capital of the UK. As Paul Thompson, chairman of Sanderson Electronics Plc, puts it, Pick is like the wheel – it’s simple but it works. Pick users have little time for the complexities of Unix or technological frills like object-oriented programming, they simply want an application development environment that lets them master their own information technology requirements. Such a philosophy is in keeping with the gritty and bustling industrial environment that is Sheffield – the home of Pick vendors Sanderson and EDP. Indeed a steel manufacturer in Sheffield was the first UK company to use Pick, way back in the late 1970s. Sanderson began as a systems software house in 1983, when it saw an opportunity to grow by climbing aboard the Pick bandwaggon. It began to promote itself as The Pick Specialists and quickly established a reputation beyond its size, since the slogan led people to believe that Sanderson was the biggest company in Pick in the UK. It has grown at a compound annual rate of 50% and is now part of a grouping which has a UKP50m turnover, employs 700 people and has 30 offices in 11 countries.

Pick firms do everything

Around 40% of turnover is derived from the UK, 25% from Australasia, 20% from the US and 15% from continental Europe. This is the way Thompson likes to analyse the business: in terms of companies within the grouping General Automation accounts for half of all revenues, with SGA and Sanderson each contributing a quarter. Of that turnover, UKP15m comes from field service revenue, a flow of money which just grew naturally with the business. For as Thompson will tell you, one of the exciting things about Pick was that it was not taken up by the big vendors, which meant that the companies involved with it had to do everything from writing software to providing maintenance. On first meeting Thompson you are inclined to believe his characterisation of himself as a chartered accountant cum self-taught programmer who grew up in the Yorkshire mining community of Barnsley and who likes to run a steady, comfortable business where no-one is afraid to admit to a mistake. In fact this unpretentious Yorkshireman possesses a great deal of business acumen and rarely fails his shareholders, while retaining an infectious enthusiasm for Pick, the environment in which he first began programming as an accountant. For example, Thompson’s decision to bail out the US Pick company General Automation last year by taking an equity stake, which currently stands at 49%, raised a few eyebrows. Many believed he was taking a big risk. However, this was not how Thompson viewed the situation: those crying wolf saw a loss-making computer manufacturer, Sanderson saw a company with UKP10m in annual service revenues, a huge customer base and a number of good vertical market software products – in short a company for whom the hardware manufacturing was incidental, comprising a mere 15% of its activity. –

By Katy Ring

Besides which Thompson believes that the General has one of the finest (and potentially one of the most extensively used) Pick software products in the world with its Maxial hotel package which has been adopted by, among others, the Hyatt International hotel chain. As for when Sanderson is likely to take the final 2% of its proposed controlling stake in the US company, Thompson says that isn’t important, since SGA, General Automation and Sanderson act in unison already and couldn’t have better managerial relations. Sanderson is currently repositioning itself as a world-wide computer services group and is looking for acquisitions in the UK that will help it realise this aspiration. Thompson is looking for systems houses (wedded to any software environment) that can be acquired for less than 50% of turnover and to which Sanderson can add service. Companies within the grouping remain autonomous and as long as they make 10% net profit on sales and operate within the law Sanderson rarely intervenes. Although Thompson will tell you that at the end of the day serving th

e customer is what counts, not the championing of any particular software or hardware environment, it’s still clear that he is a Pick devotee. As to the Pick community’s shift in emphasis from saying Pick is a rival to Unix to the current argument that Pick is a database and a set of tools – in both cases, Thompson says, somewhat roguishly, that Pick was just trying to get some mileage out of the marketing clout of vendors promoting computing trends. Having said that, he adds that Pick is really an application development environment and is more comparable with Oracle, Infor-mix and Ingres as a product than it is to Unix. He believes that Pick vendors that are saying that Pick cannot survive without Unix are misguided, since Unix is a base level of software and, therefore, needs Pick. He added that Pick vendors going down the Unix track that choose to write their applications to support, say Oracle or Ingres, could go out of business by making the wrong choice when there is a shakeout among relational database vendors. Pick, on the other hand, is not a Johnny-come-lately and is machine independent.

Fault-tolerant Pick

However, Thompson concedes that in some cases a user has to have Unix to satisfy CCTA requirements, to run a specific Unix application or for communications purposes (at this point Thompson interjected that criticism of Pick communications capabilities is totally invalid, as Sanderson has never failed to satisfy a communications requirement) and, thus, that Sanderson must offer Unix. To date there have been two main approaches to this problem: to put Pick on top of Unix as Oracle does, or to run Pick applications under Unix using a product such as Ult/ix. Sanderson, however, is adopting a different approach: development work is underway at General Automation to couple a Unix and a Pick processor to produce a two-processor machine capable of running Pick and a standard version of Unix negotiations with Unix vendors are under way to establish which version of Unix will be adopted. Another strategy which Sanderson is pursuing is fault-tolerant Pick systems. To this end it has struck a deal with Stratus (CI No 1,380) and is the sole UK supplier of the Stratus Pick machine. In three years’ time Thompson believes that half of Sanderson’s business could be based on fault-tolerant machines. This is because all of the company’s markets would welcome a fault tolerant offering if they could afford it. At present the Stratus machine costs UKP500,000, but Thompson reckons that within three years it could come down to the UKP100,000 level at which point he says people can’t afford not to have one. He claims that Pick is a stable database that moves into the fault tolerant environment with ease and said that Sanderson, the General and Stratus are developing a common implementation for fault tolerance.