Title: March Chat with Scott Broomfield
Author: mthacker
Date: 03/25/1999
<marlene.thacker@centurasoft.com>
question:Thank you for joining Scott Broomfield and guests at
our Monthly Chat. If you have a question, please post the
question in a private mail to me, Marlene Thacker aka
"question" and I will post all questions in the order received
scott_ceo:Welcome! I have been on the road at ceBIT in
Germany and it was a great show but I am happy to be here
and ready for a great chat!
question:rkapp: Marlene, I'm not sure I'll make it for the
on-line session tonight. Could you please ask a question on
my behalf to Scott ? (He (should) know what it's about).
Scott, You had annouced a 1.6 version including all the COM
object integration. Then you changed focus (at least that's how
it's perceived) to deliver a maintenance release including only
small enhancements to COM integration. Now I'm told that
the maintenance release includes ALL enhancements initially
promised in 1.6 What is it all abo .
scott_ceo:The question is almost 100% correct. With one
small exception.
The only feature NOT in 1.5.1 that was originally scheduled in
1.6 is Active X controls for non-Windows event. All other
features, including ATLs, the fixing of the bugs, the Object
Nationalizer, etc. are in 1.5.1
The mistake the company made was unilaterally renaming the
product from 1.6 to a 1.5.1 release. 1.5.1 will be out by the
end of April and I apologize that this has caused so much
confusion.
question:Martin Knopp: Scott, Please give us a short summary
of your impressions of the Cebit from centuras point of view. .
scott_ceo:ceBIT was wonderful!
For the first time since I have been at the company, I have
made the observation that we are regaining a sense of a
Centura community in the marketplace. Where last year's
ceBIT, I heard more about concerns for the company's
liability, this year was totally focused on the company's
strategic direction and the new products we are delivering,
such as SQLBase SafeGarde!
My initial perceptions are that SQLBase SafeGarde faired
very well at ceBIT - a lot of interest with new customers and
great acceptance from Centura's existing customers.
question:MartinKnopp: What are your plans to increase the
number of developers using CTD/CWD? We (your
customers and current developers) need this to be able to hire
well trained staff to reasonable rates and to gain confidence in
Centura Development Tools by our own customer. .
scott_ceo:I had a very long discussion last week at ceBIT
with Roger Kapp. He and I discussed at length the company's
launch last year of SOLO.
What I understand NOW that I didn't understand before is
that SOLO was the company's marketing attempt at
combating the marketing machine of Power Builder.
Although from a financial perspective the SOLO program was
a failure, it did provide the company with a set of loyal new
developers. We are presently working on programs that will
be announced that will address the number of developers that
are on CTD. We understand the concerns the market is telling
us with respect to developers but we must have our act
together with respect to the launch with CTD 1.5.1
question:MartinKnopp: Do you have any new information
about CTD 2.0? Will the promised date of delivery (I
remeber end Q3/1999) hold? Can we expect some big
marketing campaign along with the release of 2.0? .
scott_ceo:Martin, you have asked two questions. Let me
answer them in order.
First, delivery dates of CTD 2.0.: We just completed our
systems design review for 2.0. A number of loyal CTD
developers were very pleased to see a portion of the alpha
code working. The Centura engineering team learned a great
deal and will be incorporating a number of the ideas we
gathered from these users into 2.0 The CTD alpha code is
aniticpated at the end of Q2 and a beta will be ready by the
beginning of Q4
To answer your second question, we have thought through a
number of marketing programs that we may want to initiate
during the fourth quarter but we have not sized the investment
we are going to make for the program. A major element of
our thinking here will be how well we perform in the second
and third quarters.
question:jgupta: When do you expect to see some results from
the Raima acquisition on your bottom line .
scott_ceo:We have said that we expect the acquisition to
close in the early part of June. Accordingly, I do not expect a
great deal of bottom or top line impact in Q2.
We would begin to see the impact in our third fiscal quarter as
we begin to integrate our products lines and channels.
question:jgupta: Are you going to focus on pushing SqlBase
Safegarde into the financial, health and govermental markets
where it most probably is most sellable .
scott_ceo:You hit the nail on the head.
question:MartinKnopp: How was the feedback on SQLBase
SafeGarde on Cebit? .
scott_ceo:Execellent.
The central European group was already sold over 150
customers that have upgraded to SQLBase SafeGarde.
Additionally, Central Europe, as well as other protions of the
company have begun to see new customer interest when the
impact of end-to-end, full security is realized. We only expect
the interest will get greater!
question:MartinKnopp: Scott, do you mean you will make
announcements that target increasing developer base with the
launch of 1.5.1? .
scott_ceo:Getting back to the developer programs we talked
about launching around the release of 1.5.1, yes, we
absolutely do!
question:jgupta: What sort of feedback are you getting on the
Raima aquisition, your share prices do not seem to affected! .
scott_ceo:I want to address this in two parts.
part one: both customers and market analysts see this move as
very strategic and will position Centura as a leader in the
embedded and micro-database solutions marketplace.
The answer to part two is a little bit more difficult: stock prices
move on sustained performance and on the expectation of
performance. Accordingly, although we were very pleased to
announce the merger with Raima and welcome them, we need
to perform both on the bottom and top lines of this company
and send the message to the market that way.
question:MartinKnopp: There seem to be ideas to implement
SMP support in the next release of SQLBase - how does this
fit into your strategy of embedded database? BTW .
scott_ceo:SMP support is currently on the list of features for
the next version of SQLBase.
However, we have not completed the systems design review
for the next release and have not determined if this is an "A"
feature of the product Two points, however, to note: we are
adding on 7.5.1 of SQLBase OLE DB support. And Raima,
with the next release of Velocis will have SMp support.
This is why it's important to evaluate the integration of the two
companies to optimize the most important features our
products can offer the marketplace.
question:jgupta: A sensitive question. Do you expect to use
the SqlBase brand name for Raima's products ie. SqlBase CE
for the RDB product? .
scott_ceo:We are continuing to brand the SQLBase family of
products while not losing the core strength of the Raima
offerings and product familiarity.
question:MartinKnopp: Scott, what about your share prices?
The stay around $1 whatever you do. Do you have any ideas
why - Sterling seems not to sell nothing during the last month?
.
scott_ceo:To be clear about the relationship with Sterling, as a
significant holder of shares, they are an affiliate, but not an
insider....
Since they now hold less than 10% ownership in Centura,
they no longer need to report to the SEC when they sell stock
As a result, we can no longer easily track if they are selling or
if they are long-term holders.
question:jgupta: When can we see a beta of SNAp? .
scott_ceo:In addition to running the business and making sure
that the company performs, John Bowman, our CFO, and I
are working towards a comprehensive program to provide the
investors and financial analysts a strong message about our
value.
So that we are all clear, SNAP stands for SQL Network for
Appliances.
We have demonstrated our SNAP solution at Embedded
Systems Conference, ceBIT and Novell's Brainshare with a
GREAT degree of interest. Our target beta release date is the
end of Q2 and we will be working closely with Raima to
ensure an effective combination of their very small footprint
RDM database and SNAP to be delivered to the Win CE
and RTOS (real time operating systems) markets!!
question:MartinKnopp: Scott, will there be native routers for
the Raima databases and will the SQL language used in
SQLBase and raima databases be made compatible so that it
will be ease to develop apps that run against both platforms? .
scott_ceo:By definition, the company overtime will create a
cmmon API, which we do with all our products. It is,
however, a little early to be discussing a complete engineering
strategy for all the products as we just announced the
acquisition last week.
We wil be doing this engineering intergration work over the
next three to four months and will continue to communicate
that to you as we understand the detailed game plan is for our
product family.
question:IanIdea: I noticed your announcement on
TeamMigrate. Is this the start of an initiative to provide a more
rounded consultancy service? .
scott_ceo:Due to a real-time opportunity we found with
CamDATA who was needing to port from Pervasive's
BTrieve to SQLBase SafeGarde, we created a utility to do
this..........
When this occured, we realized almost immediately, to only
migrate databases from Pervasive but also from Access and
SQL Anywhere! This utility, in conjunction with our credo to
"Always Add Value to Our Customers," we decided to create
a service that would make it easier and fast for our customers
to move to a faster, fully secure relational database...the only
one in the marketbase. The database for grouwnups! ;-)
In addition, in April we will be announcing we will announce
the Centura Team2000, another utility and service built with
our products that tests any application that has been built in
either CTD or SQLWindows that ensures that those apps are
Y2K compliant...another example of adding value to our
customers.
question:dagator: this snap stuff all sounds very good; but I'm
still in the business of building enterprise-oriented applications
internally. What benefit can I expect to receive from the work
that you're doing? . .
scott_ceo:Today your primary concern ARE your internal
development programs and as such, SQLBase SafeGarde is
an extremely powerful solution that addresses both security
issues and low-cost of ownership requirements.
In the future, information appslinces will become part of the
computing model and you will want to extend your apps into
those devices. As such, those devices will require information
and that information needs to have Three requirements:
accessibility to the back office, security and self managing.
This means that SNAP is important as a connectivity solution
where Raima is important as the front-end database for these
devices and SQLBase SafeGarde, offering the security.
As we continue to extend into these new markets, it's imprtant
to remember that we continue to develop CTD with attributes
like COM and DCOM so we continue to partner with you as
you develop new apps into your legacy systems.
question:jgupta: Will we be able to in the future create
Appliance based apps for CE using CTD and Snap? .
scott_ceo:The answer is Yes...
So the apps you build with CTD will be accessible through
WIN CE clients and other portable /mobile platforms
question: jgupta: We hear very little about SqlBase Exchange,
nothing much has happened since its release. What are your
plans for this product? .
scott_ceo:We see SQLBase Exchange as a critical piece to
TeamMigrate because what we sell is an EMBEDDABLE
database that must be able to talk to all the larger
enterprise-wide databases. Furthermore, SQLBase Exchange
will be incorporated into other product bundles as we move
toward both our E-Business solution as well as
SNAP...because it's all about connectivity. scott_ceo:It's not
only about the connectivity between the client and the server-
it's about the connectivity from one server to another server.
Especially if one of those servers is SQLBase SafeGarde with
end-to-end security in front of your corporate firewall(there to
provide security to your e-business solutions). Finally, we just
recently received a great write-up in an German publication
that talked about the power of SQLBase Exchange!!
It rated it as an excellent solution - from an ease-of-use and
power perspective.
jgupta:Do you have a translation and link to this
question:MartinKnopp: Scott, I missed net.db during this chat!
How does this product perform from the business point of
view? I do not see many pages implemented with net.db (to
be serious I did not find a single one beside Centura and
DataLine)? .
scott_ceo:We are growing our net.db customer base every
day and are pleased to offer you a few success stories today
from GoodMotors, Takvara and PieceWorks - you can find
these under the net.db product section on our site. Another
example is a large securities brokerage house that deploys
net.db internally - we are beginning to find this is the case: that
customers are deploying this solution as an intra or extranet
tool!
question:jgupta: Do you have a translation and link to SqlBase
Exchange article? .
egonza:Takvara does web site public for sucess stories of
net.db ?
scott_ceo:We don't have a link to that article today but we are
working on getting reprint permissions - if we can, you'll find it
under the product sections on both our site and the German
office site.
In closing, I want to thank you for taking the time to ask great
questions and listening. I look forward to next month's
chat...when we host Raima! Talk to you in a month. All
success.
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