It has been so quiet here. Let's post Mark Hunter's article from latest issue of "Centura Pro" to keep this thread alive.
propublishing.com
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Elvis Has Left the Building
by Mark Hunter, Editor
That's a phrase that has become popular in American culture recently. Its origins are in the wildly popular Elvis Presley concerts of many years ago. At those concerts, the audience would get aroused almost to the point of hysteria, and would remain in the theater after the close of the show, hoping for another glimpse of the King. Sometimes the only way that promoters could get people to leave was to announce that..."Elvis has left the building". Now it's the definitive clich‚ for expressing finality.
Before the Munich conference, plans were being made-plans that are now public. Sam Inman, like Umang Gupta before him, is out. Dick Gelhaus is out. Earl Stahl, who is practically the personification of Centura's 4GL tools, is out, too, limited to an advisory role and a presence on the board. It's hard to imagine anyone who will be missed more by long-time developers, like me. Stahl was the only senior executive of the old guard to speak at the Munich conference. He has acquired some corporate smoothness over the years as he progressed from manager to V.P. to Chief Technical Officer to member of the board of directors. But, thankfully, he is still an engineer at heart and still an honest and direct speaker. Centura is now searching for a new CTO. Good luck to them-they'll look long and hard to find his equal.
The ultimate expression of outsourcing
Scott Broomfield, the new chief executive officer of Centura, and Kathy Lane, the new V.P. of marketing, introduced themselves. This might be the ultimate expression of outsourcing: They are the new bosses, and yet they are not employees! They come from Hickey and Hill, a consulting firm that Centura had retained to examine ways of returning to prosperity. The firm presented its findings and, to demonstrate its belief in its recommendations, offered Broomfield and Lane, along with a new CFO, on a two-year contract to carry out the recommendations. They will be paid in stock options rather than money-quite a bet. Broomfield and Lane discussed the long and rocky history of Centura at Munich, and presented their plans for the future, including more advertising and better customer support, which were well received by the tool-centric developers in the audience. Recently Lane told me that Centura has retained Miller/Shandwick Technologies, a major public relations firm, to coordinate a new advertising campaign that will feature Centura tools in prominent trade publications.
Storm clouds or sunshine?
Centura Software Corp. owes about $10 million to Computer Associates, an early investor. The note matures in 1998. Based on recent stock prices, this is almost a majority of the entire capitalization of the company. It will be interesting to see how this debt will be repaid or restructured in the future. Many developers have privately expressed fears of CA as a majority owner, because of its past reputation for mishandling the development tools it acquires.
Adding some complexity to this issue is Centura's new partnership with CA's new Jasmine product. Jasmine, an
object-oriented multimedia database, is a big product with many features. Centura Team Developer will use a Jasmine
ActiveX control to perform transactions or fetch data. Centura envisions customers using Web Developer to present
Jasmine data over the Internet, and CTD to present that information on Windows workstations. A free demo of both
Jasmine and Web Developer are available from Centura's Web site.
So, who is Elvis?
Well, Earl Stahl is Elvis: Certainly a star, he has left this particular concert. Good luck to him in his future endeavors.
And ForeSite is Elvis: The product that occupied all of Centura's flashy marketing attention and dollars during 1997 is gone, back with InfoSpinner. They'll need luck, too, to do battle against Kiva and similar products.
Sam Inman is not Elvis. Practically invisible in recent months, he vanishes quietly, along with his big plans.
A major Centura customer may be leaving the building. Aurum has brought out a Visual Basic version of their popular sales management package, and future enhancements of their Centura version may be in doubt. Lots of Aurum customers still need help with custom modifications, though; be of good cheer.
And many other vendors are continuing to prosper and grow with Centura; take a look at this month's profile of Rothenberg Health Systems for an example.
Back to the future
Finally, Centura customers have what they wanted: a renewed emphasis on the 4GL tools. It will be interesting to see what can be accomplished with this focus, and with the new management team. The King is dead; long live the new king.
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