GUPTA, the soon-to-be-renamed client/server tools company, has sent its new chief executive officer hunting publicity following its restructure last month.
The company's new chief executive officer Sam Inman - an IBM veteran of 21 years who in April last year took on the post as chief operating officer at Gupta - visited Hong Kong last week to promote Centura, the name of the new product family which will gradually replace the title of the company.
Initially Centura will co-exist on the Gupta letterhead until such time as the public acceptance of the new logo will allow them to phase out Gupta. Centura is being positioned as a supplementary product to Gupta's main product offerings, SQL Base and SQL Windows, and will be available next month.
Mr Inman said existing customers would not be forced onto the migration bandwagon.
In an oblique reference to the Windows 95 release by Microsoft last year he said the software industry had become used to bringing out a new product every two years and expecting to reap the benefits with instant customer upgrades. Mr Inman said that was not the plan with Centura.
The managing director of Gupta's Asia operation, Benjamin Wong, said the company had retained a research and development (R&D) team with its SQL Base and SQL Windows tools and new versions of those products were being developed.
Gupta believes the new features of the Centura products will be reason enough for many companies to switch to what Mr Wong described as the only product suited to building applications for the newer three-tier client/server architecture for around US$10,000.
