Ashton-Tate Corp is in a bind as the market moves away from low-end personal computer database management systems. The Torrance, California company is still a heavyweight in software company terms, but it needs to take decisive action to avoid going into a decline – and the rumour mill has been churning with gossip of a hostile bid for the company for months. But Ashton-Tate does have a new game plan to secure its future – and that of dBase as a live and vibrant product: it wants to create a version that will become the development environment for an army of Unix systems developers. It has been working on versions of dBase for DEC’s VAX/VMS and Ultrix operating systems for many months, but recognises that the battle for Unix relational databases is largely lost and won – Oracle Corp is now a $583m a year company after all, and has left Ashton-Tate in its dust. The Ashton-Tate plan, according to Computerworld, is therefore to turn dBase into a development system adhering to the client-server model. It wants to get the devlopment environment up under Unix System V.3 and V.4, Santa Cruz Operation’s Xenix, BSD Unix 4.2 and IBM’s AIX. Basis of the strategy will be the forthcoming dBase IV 1.1 release, due to ship later this quarter – and the concept becomes less startling when one learns that dBase development is done largely under Unix and the finished product transferred to MS-DOS. Key benefit for users will be the possibility of transferring the enormous base of dBase applications over to Unix – especially as many of them have grown to the point where they are not really suitable to run under MS-DOS any more.
