Thoroughbred Software International, Inc. markets software development systems including Thoroughbred Basic™ (3GL), IDOL-IV® (4GL), and OPENworkshop® (OOPs), Solution-IV™ Financial Applications, specialized applications for the Recreation, Reprographics and e-Commerce industries, and supports a community of over 1,000 value added resellers and partners.
Our products support a three-tier architecture, are open-database (ODBC) and run on virtually any operating system including UNIX, Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP, Linux and Compaq/DEC VMS.
Thoroughbred provides complete consulting services, customer support, training and maintenance programs for our products. Our TS WebServer™ enables all Thoroughbred-based applications to operate on the Internet including support of e-Commerce and Applications Service Provider (ASP) requirements.
Why Choose Thoroughbred? | Corporate Priorities | On Openness
Directions to Thoroughbred
There are powerful development forces affecting the market today. You will be expected to adopt and support these forces while facing the practical problem of maintaining a return on your past development effort.
From the hardware point of view, networks will be prevalent. There will still be many systems with character terminals in use, however, the overwhelming majority of new systems installed will support the client/workstation attached to a server/host model. This hardware model is driving the current determination to move to Client/Server technology.
The distribution of workstations to the desktop has enabled suppliers to deliver Graphical User Interfaces. Far from a passing phase, GUIs provide charts, graphs, pictures and sound to enrich the presentation of many applications. Icons provide the opportunity to provide pictorial menus that do not need translation.
Developers continue to seek more productive ways to develop and, at least as important, maintain business applications. But these applications must be capable of implementation on a wide range of hardware, operating systems and databases. Developers need to be able to accommodate the existing environments and technical preferences of a broad spectrum of customers.
Because of all these forces, Thoroughbred is concentrating on three strategic directions:
Underpinned by a determination to support Open standards, and the concept of, evolution, rather than revolution, we are convinced that Thoroughbred is well positioned to deliver winning products to software developers around the world.
We Deliver Software Development Environments For Business Applications.
Thoroughbred is a company with a focus. We provide complete development environments for software developers. Since our foundation in 1982, we have kept our focus. This has enabled us to design and bring to the market a complete range of 3GL, 4GL and Object Oriented development environments. We believe in building on past successes. And, we are aware that our business partners also want to capitalize on their past achievements. So, we are careful to provide software that allows evolution. If you have an application that is successful, but you need to adopt new technology to stay competitive, Thoroughbred has a solution.
Our IDOL-IV family of 4GL products is designed to provide an evolutionary path for our 3GL users. Our Object-Oriented environment, OPENworkshop, continues this tradition, enabling developers to retain existing data designs as they move beyond 4GL.
But we have gone further. We have provided evolutionary paths for software developers who have not used Thoroughbred environments or languages in the past. So they too can retain their past investments in application software.
We want you to be able to select the hardware, operating system, database and user interface that suits you best. So we have designed our software to be truly Open.
Thoroughbred software runs on over 100 hardware and operating system combinations. Whether you want UNIX, Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP or OpenVMS, you can run your application without modification.
Thoroughbred languages work with a wide range of database management systems. Data in ORACLE, Informix and IDOL-IV are available to Thoroughbred application developers. Microsoft Windows workstations are supported and provide a GUI alternative to character terminals.
The benefits to you as a software developer created by the commitment to Open environments are real. Your applications can be made available in any of these environments whenever you need. And your users can be confident that you can respond to their changing needs in the future.
No single supplier can provide the best environment for all occasions. We recognize that we have to concentrate our resources. We have chosen to provide the most productive application development environment available for suppliers of business software. This strategy has been successful in helping Thoroughbred to grow. All our product development plans are based on providing an evolutionary path to the future.
We need to help our business partners learn how to get the best from our products. So, we provide training, consulting, and technical support facilities.
But we go further. We realize that every sale by one of our business partners is also a sale for Thoroughbred. So, naturally, we want our business partners to succeed in their markets.
We organize conferences regularly for our business partners. These conferences enable us to learn the needs of our business partners. They also provide an ideal opportunity for our business partners to meet, exchange ideas, and identify opportunities that allow them to cooperate to their mutual benefit.
A true commitment to Openness means allowing choices in the machine, language, database and user interface. Thoroughbred provides developers with these choices, anticipating that they will choose Thoroughbred products because of their superiority and flexibility.
Thoroughbred runs on over 100 different hardware systems. An application can be developed on any one of these systems, and will operate without change on all of the other supported machines.
This means that developers can be confident that, no matter what the preferences of their customers or the most advantageous commercial terms of hardware suppliers at the time, their solution will run on their preferred hardware platform.
It also means that business partners can be confident that their investment in application software will be secure. As technology develops and machines are upgraded, software based on Thoroughbred environments will continue to operate without change.
Thoroughbred languages work with all the leading operating systems. All major UNIX versions, Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP and OpenVMS, as well as many others, are supported. This means you can develop your application on the operating system that suits your needs, but deliver it onto the operating system your customer prefers.
Increasingly, networked configurations with multiple, differing operating systems are being deployed. Client/Server architectures are being used by corporations to distribute processing.
Thoroughbred environments fully support these needs, allowing application developers to address the maximum number of business opportunities.
The Thoroughbred environment includes its own RDBMS. In addition, developers can choose to use BTrieve, CISAM or ORACLE database products to manage their data. Again, the developer is able to create a single version of their application and support the full range of differing requirements placed on them by their customers. In many cases a developer is asked to integrate their application with other database applications a customer already has. Vital business data cannot be discarded. Developers using Thoroughbred environments are able to offer this integration because of the choices that Thoroughbred provide.
"Classical" multi-user applications have depended on character terminals to provide the user interface. A wide range of these terminals are supported by Thoroughbred environments.
Microsoft Windows has led users to expect a Graphical User Interface, the ability to switch between applications and to move data using cut/paste, OLE, and drag/drop facilities. Applications developed in Thoroughbred environments can offer all of these facilities due to the features in the VIP family of products.
You can install a system with a mixture of character terminals and Windows workstations, and as the needs of your customer changes, you can easily keep in step.