Borland acquisition emphasises three-tier client-server model

Borland has reaffirmed its intention of promoting three-tier client-server computing with the acquisition of Open Environment Corp (OEC), a company that develops intelligent middleware for enterprises running distributed computing systems.

Borland chief executive Gary Wetsel visited Japan last week to attend a developers' conference and took time out for a short detour to Hong Kong to announce Borland's plans of including OEC's products such as Entera and OLEenterprise in Borland's product portfolio.

OEC's fledgling Hong Kong and China operation is staffed by an experienced team of IT professionals led by managing director Francis Ng, who will concurrently work with client-server tools developer Gupta as managing director for the area.

Gupta chief executive Sam Inman, whose company will be renamed Centura, also visited Hong Kong recently recognising the importance of the Greater China market for second-generation client-server support.

Mr Ng said 99 per cent of his existing customers in China and Hong Kong continued to use first-generation client-server systems and there were good reasons to change.

'They have enjoyed a major productivity gain by moving to the client/server environment with a GUI interface, coming down from a mini or a mainframe or upsizing from a PC Lan,' he said.

'But basically they now have a fat client, whether it be a Pentium PC or a workstation, which works fine for decision support but when they look at a high-density of transactions it is not satisfactory.' He said that Entera sat between the client and the data on the server offering a major productivity advantage.