Frank Dodge is finally staging a comeback after the high drama of his exit from Dun & Bradstreet Corp 18 months ago. Explaining that his acrimonious departure from Dun & Bradstreet – following the merger of McCormack & Dodge with Management Science America – was not the best time of his life, he is now glad he had the opportunity to spend a year reading and thinking about what he wanted to do. What he wants to do now is run a software company devoted to selling accountancy packages specially designed for the Unix client-server market (CI No 1,742). The new company, called the Dodge Group Inc, is privately funded by Dodge and will be headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, while core development is being undertaken in the UK in Kingston, Surrey. He is the first to admit that the application area – accountancy – is scarcely a new one for him, although the mid-range market is. However, as he decided in 1987 that the mainframe market was dying, it is a fairly predictable move. Of course he could have focussed on the AS/400 market, and decided against it partly because a lot of software houses are already there, but mainly because the AS/400 is old dead-end technology. He is convinced that the future belongs to Unix and has chosen IBM’s RS/6000 as the first environment for the Dodge software. He is not worried about the marketing muddle that IBM is creating with its mid-range, saying that the industry has grabbed on to the RS/6000 as a commercial machine and there is nothing IBM can do about it. Over time there will be other versions of the software for environments such as Ultrix but Dodge thinks it likely that versions will stick with the Open Software Foundation flavours because supporting too many platforms becomes a developer’s nightmare. Dodge co-founded McCormack & Dodge in 1969 when he was targeting the mainframe market and believes that this second time around with the Dodge Group, growth will be much quicker. This is because the concept of packaged software was alien to in-house data processing managers then, while it is far from being an alien concept today. Furthermore, he thinks that every company using a mainframe will be using client-server technology within 10 years. He concedes that there is a huge residual conservatism in the computing user base because of the prevalence of Cobol programmers but believes that packaged software like that offered by the Dodge Group will ease the problem because Cobol programmers can maintain their programs as they are slowly wound down. Meanwhile they can gradually get involved with the new technology by supporting the Unix packages. Originally Dodge was looking to acquire a company but could not find anything that fitted the bill. In the UK he met John Linwood and Alan Hambrook who had been working on an accountancy package since July 1990. At first Dodge thought he would just take distribution rights to the product but then all three came to a mutual agreement to join up and form the Dodge Group.
C with Ingres
Hambrook and Linwood are the developers behind the Mega software product Miracle, which sprang to fame as being a contributing factor in the downfall of the Headland Group Plc after Mega was acquired by Headland. Hambrook maintains that all the problems began after the company was taken over, which drew a wry, but unfortunately – unrepeatable remark from Dodge. Anyway, using a VAXstation, the two developers started developing client-server code and eventually formed their own company, Omega Software Ltd in 1990 to refine their ideas. Last July they started grinding code and testing modules. The applications are being written in C with the Ingres database, although interfaces to other databases will emerge. They use Windows 3.0 and Motif graphical user interfaces and are designed to be portable so that new interfaces can be added without changing much of the code. Dodge judges the applications to be client-server because the application code is separated into some for the database server, some for the client and some for operation on both the server and the clie
nt. Hambrook says that the accountancy sector lends itself well to the client-server model as it has a regimented approach to working and requires segmented chunks – other sectors with less regulated working practices would not, he feels, be nearly as easy to design for. The high volume debit/credit transactions are being kept on the back end database, which is typically centralised for accountancy transactions, while data can be manipulated and presented graphically on the front end. The product is planned for release at the end of 1992 when some revolutionary pricing structures will also be introduced as the old software pricing model no longer fits the brave new world of client-server computing.
