dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb) (08/18/89)
There's a lot of interesting information about Index Technology in an article entitled "Start-up Index Tech Jump-Started CASE", by John Desmond, in Software Magazine, April 1989, page 84. Like most articles in the industry press, it doesn't go into any deep technical detail; in fact, it's mainly about Index's history and business strategy, rather than technical issues. But here are some brief excerpts that you might find interesting and relevant: Index is working on a major rewrite of Excelerator. It is a partial rewrite from C to C++. The major news of long-term impact is the evolving relationship of Index with Ontologic of Billerica, Mass, the reincarnation of Mosaic Technologies. Index plans to base all its future products on Ontologic's new generation object-oriented database, hence the rewrite into the object-oriented language, C++. Index has agreed to license the technology from Ontologic. Index co-founder Burt Rubenstein, vice president and chief technologist, said the object-oriented technology "gives us the ability to bring higher functionality products to the market faster." The object model is better than the relational model for programs that structure "a small number of heterogeneous objects with a large number of relationships between them." Current versions of Excelerator are built atop a file management system, not a database. Index is the faraway market leader in PC Case tools today, with 41% of the market, vs 15% for KnowledgeWare, 15% for Nastec and 6% for Cadre Technologies, according to Sentry [Sentry Market Research of Westborough, Mass]. (Respondents to the mainframe section of the survey gave Index a 10% share of that market, followed by Texas Instruments with 7% and Pansophic with 6%. That is despite the fact that Index offers no mainframe product, although Grejtak [Index's Senior VP of Marketing and Sales] said some users run their Excelerator dictionary on MVS mainframes.) [In an earlier posting, I said that Index was the "largest CASE company"; apparently I was being inaccurate, and should have said "the market leader in PC CASE tools", at least according to this market survey.] [Disclaimer: I don't work for Index, nor for Ontologic. In fact, Ontologic is or will be a competitor of Object Design; both companies are in the OODBMS business. I hope this provies enough material that people can draw their own conclusions about Index Technology, etc, and we can get back to discussion of technical issues.] Dan Weinreb Object Design dlw@odi.com