Progress Software Corp, which has been selling high level language tools for Unix-based database and transaction processing application development since 1981, is moving into the Visual Basic market with its own products and those it acquired when it bought Crescent Software, Ridgefield, Connecticut, for $3m, in January. Why has Progress moved to Visual Basic? There are nearly 2m copies of Visual Basic out there and the company believes it is a very lucrative market. International Data Corp estimates the aftermarket, which includes the thriving market for Visual Basic extensions and 32-bit OCX, Object Linking & Embedding Control extensions, might be worth as much as $2,000m. The simplicity of Visual Basic and the low cost of the Windows on iAPX-86 combination, enables anyone to participate, right down to the back bedroom individual who might otherwise be writing shareware. At the same time, it is a hazard to computer departments, which may have to obtain Visual Basic add-ons from multiple vendors – most often small garage shops with incompatible, untested products – in order to complete their development environments. All in all, a lucrative marketplace. Crescent currently sells sets of Visual Basic extension development tools and is readying Enquiry, a visual database application development tool with SQL query building and automatic forms layout. Further down the line is Stingray, an internal name for a Visual Basic compilation system that will improve the runtime performance of Visual Basic applications. Not strictly a compiler, Stingray is a translator or pre-compiler, translating Visual Basic code to C and C++ suitable for Microsoft’s Visual C++ compiler. It is due later this year. Crescent is based at Progress’ Bedford, Massachusetts headquarters and lead by Jennifer Bergantino.
