The Red Headed Step Child

U2 databases Universe and Unidata are like the red headed step child.  U2 has had a lot of suitors from Informix to IBM and now to Rocket Software and still not much as changed.  The growth rate is double digits, but the software is still not well know.  There are approximately 35,000 customers with 2.7 active maintenance licenses around the world.

Rocket/U2 does not really have sales people that sell software because the have none to sell.  All of the sales are driven by U2 VAR's that package the database in with their software.  The time to change this model is now. 

When Oracle started in 1977 selling its signature database and middleware it only took 9 years before it started developing business application software.  In the intervening years it spent billions to purchase software companies like PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Hyperion solutions to name just a few of the 100 or so acquisitions.

So Rocket needs to loosen the purse strings and start acquisitions that help sell the databases licenses just like Oracle and Microsoft are doing.  Then those sales people will not be writing sales orders from the VAR's, they will be out on the street, so to speak, making those sales.  The growth rate could be 10 times better instead of a 120 million dollar business that should be a billion dollar business.

Think about would you rather buy your software from a VAR or the company that makes the database?  Easy answer in Q4 of 2010 Oracle had 7 billion in licenses and 13.1 billion in software services.

Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, nerd?

Well we do feel lucky? Yes we do!

We work in either Universe and Unidata databases with our programming language called UniBasic. We can write in a few lines of code what Java programmers and C# programmers take hundreds of lines of code. We have a very simple language with no scope that allows us to do amazing things. UniBasic allows the manipulation of strings and data with unprecedented ease. Ask the companies like Nordstrom's, IBM, Petco, Dell, and many more if they use these databases.

Our team at U2logic, is currently taking a legacy applications actually written in R83 Basic that we thought was a rather large application. We ported to Unidata about 10 years ago and the amount of code stayed the same. We are currently porting it to the web under Unidata. It was originally 200,000 lines of Basic code and is around 50,000 lines of UniBasic code. We reduced the number of lines in UniBasic by removing the UI (User Interface) and moving it that to HTML and JavaScript resulting in just the business logic.

Our XLr8Developer tool that was written in UniBasic. We decided about 5 years ago to move it to Eclipse IDE framework. The code ended up being 30 times as big and functionally it was the same except it is written in Java.

But is that a fair comparison. Maybe but it points out how our brethren in Java, C# and others have to work a lot harder to get the same results. Wow, we should really feel luck.

BTW: The title line is taken with liberties from a very famous movie in 1971 with Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. The full quote is great:

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?