plever@Pacer.UUCP (Paul Lever) (08/28/90)
Gupta held their First Annual Developers Conference last week
in San Francisco. The event attracted about 500 developers from
around the US and the world. I'm not sure what Gupta's expectations
were but most of the attendees felt this was a very strong turn
out. The program was a very fair mix of technical
information/discussion with a little marketing hype thrown in.
Umang Gupta (the Pres) presented the history and philosophy
of the company: Open Client/Server architecture with separate front
end tools for the programmer, power-user and end-user.
Much of the technical discussion was around the recently
released version of Guptas SQLBase 4.x database server (MSDOS, OS/2
and soon to be UNIX(?)). And about the soon to be released new
version of their front end tool for programmers, SQLWindows 2.0.
Version 2.0 is now in beta test and planned for release before year
end. It is a powerful 4GL tool for developing applications under
Windows 3.0 or Presentation Manager. The new version has a
graphical report writer which looked extremely powerful and easy to
use. There are plans to add connections from SQLWindows 2.0 to
other database servers (some are already in place ?) such as
Oracle, DB2, OS/2 EE Data Manager, SQLServer(?) etc.
The conference attendees seemed more positive and enthusiastic
about Gupta products than I've seen at other manufactures
conferences. Most of the developers I spoke with were very excited
about the products (especially SQLWindows). They had long Wish
Lists for the Gupta development staff and felt that they were open
to listening and adjusting their priorities for future releases.
On the last day of the conference Gupta held a session
requiring the signing of a non-disclosure agreement. They talked
about future directions of the company and demo'd some impressive
future product offering.
(No I don't work for Gupta and these are my opinions,
^^^^^^^^
not facts, about Gupta)
Paul Lever