Vendors Maximize Value of MultiValue Investments

Database Trends and Applications Magazine recently posed a question to industry leaders in the MultiValue Community. 

IN THE FACE OF an uncertain economic outlook, organizations as well as government agencies and educational institutions are focused on controlling costs, while also maximizing IT investments that have already been made. What is your company doing to help customers extend the value of their MultiValue assets? 

BOB MARKOWITZ, SALES EXECUTIVE, JBASE INTERNATIONAL
ENHANCING AND EXTENDING rather than replacing is the name of the game. jBASE International is committed to helping our customers leverage the latest technologies while still retaining the fundamental value in their MultiValue investment. We deliver a product that is integrated with the host operating system to ensure that the new technologies are supported, plus we have a professional services team available for training, conversion, and complete project lifecycle and implementation activities to support our customers’ changing needs.   We maintain what we believe to be one of the largest development teams in the MultiValue marketplace.  We regularly update the current version of jBASE (Release 4) and have committed to provide support for this release level through to 2012. This stable version availability allows our customers to direct their resources to application support and onward development rather than constantly being  forced to upgrade.  We have frozen our product license costs for more than 6 years continuing to remain very competitive within the market and provide real value to our customers.  Our published road map for releases, which is driven by  customer input, shows that jBASE Release 5 will be available for our customers this year and will be a true 64-bit system with resilient files for use with the new hardware platforms and new versions of operating systems. Release 6 is already in the design phase. 

DAVID COOPER, LEAD DEVELOPER, BLUEFINITY INTERNATIONAL
THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE is encouraging organizations to maximize their current IT investment, that is, they will look to enhance/adapt/integrate what they have at the moment to achieve IT aims for business gain in preference to spending large sums of money on infrastructure replacement programs.

This fact makes the need to be able to integrate MultiValue technology with other non-MultiValue components even more pertinent. It could be argued that it presents the MultiValue community with an opportunity to prove that it can play on an equal footing with the other (commercially larger) kids on the block. This current climate is being seized upon by MultiValue developers and resellers as an ideal opportunity to sell and prove the concept of enhancing current MultiValue investment through integration. ‘Integration’ in the broadest sense of the term—integration with other databases, with new interface presentation technologies and new software development tools or creating new applications leveraging off of the existing functionally rich and powerful MultiValue systems already in place. BlueFinity is firmly focused on the issue of integrating MultiValue with Microsoft technology, specifically within the .NET technology space. The opportunity and solutions are here; the question is—will the MultiValue community continue to rise to the challenge?

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