Mention Access Technology Ltd and most people think of the 20/20 spreadsheet, but the Marlow, Buckinghamshire-based company is keen to broaden its image to encompass the various products it should now also be associated with, such as the Vivid graphical user interface, the information retrieval tools ForWords and ForComment, the recently launched User Data Management System (CI No 1,622) and one of the best kept secrets in the DEC world – the System 1032 database. The holding company for Access is the $100,000m turnover H & R Block Inc, which derives more than half its revenues from processing tax returns for the US Internal Revenue Service. Suffice to say, the group is cash rich and is investing a lot of its money into research and development for its software products division, which is made up of CompuServe and Access. The two companies appear to be sitting uneasily together – the Access side with Vivid, ForComment, ForWords and 20/20 moving into distributed computing courtesy of DEC’s enabling technology such as the application control architecture, while the CompuServe side is saddled with an unfashionable, though sturdy, database product System 1032. The marriage between the two sides is likely to happen courtesy of User Data Management System, with this report writer being tied closer to the 20/20 spreadsheet product. All of which leaves System 1032 out on a limb, yet the company has chosen to raise the product’s profile in the UK via a relaunch. In the VAX arena the database is widely respected for offering fast responses against structured queries. Consequently, it is being carefully positioned as a query database engine for the VMS environment targeted at areas such as research and development, libraries and the sort of data tracking required in, say, clinical trials. CompuServe acquired the product four years ago and has invested heavily in it taking the US user base up to a figure of 1,400. However, in Europe things have moved slowly, since the European distributor, Software Marketing International, was acquired only 18 months ago. System 1032 has never been actively marketed over here resulting in a European user base of 40. Nevertheless, the company is committed to furthering the database’s prospects and version 9.0 is due out soon offering gateways to Rdb and RMS. But does the DEC VAX world really need another third-party database? Access general manager David Cotterell thinks so because the majority of databases serve the transaction processing market, whereas System 1032 is a query-based system highly optimised for the VMS environment. It will continue to be optimised for this market and will follow the development of VMS closely – wheresoever DEC implements VMS, there will you find System 1032, says Cotterell. He is not worried about DEC’s next generation database, which he believes will be focused on the transaction processing market. Indeed, negotiations are going on in some European countries for DEC to market System 1032 as the query-based system alongside Rdb for transaction processing. Access is going to focus System 1032 as a niche database product for query systems in order to expand its user base. Cotterell believes that there is a potential market for the product in the UK of around 1,000 copies. He points out that competitors in the VAX database market are concentrating on transaction processing and is quite clear that Access is not about to posture as an Oracle or an Ingres. He expects to sell a small but steady stream of licences – 10 to 20 a year and will, he says, recoup good maintenance revenues. In an effort to address industry issues, the US company QuadBase has written an ANSI standard SQL interface for the product. However, Access has no plans to enhance System 1032 for a distributed computing environment and long-term plans for the product seem desultory to say the least. Does this matter? Well, it has survived thus far with very little marketing effort thanks to its extremely good performance as a query-based system for VAX/VMS. The quality of the product is not in doubt, but it
seems to deserve a better stab at the market than Access is currently offering, or was the relaunch simply a vehicle to attract an industry buyer for the System 1032 product line? Katy Ring
