Centura spins new Web - Centura Software acquires InfoSpinner - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

Software Magazine, March, 1997

A year after its corporate restructuring, Centura Software Corp. continues to expand its Internet strategy. In January, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company acquired InfoSpinner Inc., a Web technology developer based in Richardson, Texas. Centura has issued 4.5 million shares of stock to InfoSpinner shareholders, and the company will be integrated into Centura's management structure.

The acquisition comes at a critical time, says Michael Keddington, Centura's vice president of marketing and sales. Last year Centura reported $2 million in profits on top of $63 million in sales and closed out its fourth quarter of profitability. "The prospects for growth look pretty good for the company," Keddington says, "but we felt our customers needed new software that would help build Web-based or intranet applications."

Centura will leverage InfoSpinner's core Internet application server to deliver an open Web integration framework. According to Keddington, the new technology will allow users to migrate existing C , Visual Basic, PowerBuilder or Centura legacy code to the Web and integrate it with new Web technology such as Shockwave, VB Script and JavaScript.

Keddington expects immediate competition to come from smaller vendors such as Wallop Software Inc. and Kiva Software Corp. While he anticipates that bigger players such as Microsoft and Oracle will weigh in with competitive technology, Keddington says Centura's technological edge puts it on a more equal footing with the big guys. "People we used to think of as competitors are more potential partners," he says.