Powersoft is 30 years old

Forgive me posting this here, but given our tight relationship with PowerBuilder I thought it would be of interest to the community.

On 1st August 2016 Powersoft will be celebrating its 30th birthday. This is a major milestone for any I.T. company and something that we are very proud of.

It’s quite fitting as it was PowerBuilder’s 25th Birthday in July and PB has influenced our business enormously.

Colin Eley & David Peace formed Powersoft in 1986 as a consultancy developing software using a 4th generation language from Cognos called Powerhouse. This ran on Mini computers in the old green on black era. The demand for quality bespoke systems in the late 1980’s quickly brought them a list of blue chip customers like The Guardian newspaper, London Fox (futures market), Barclays Bank, and Page & Moy Travel.

We started using PowerBuilder at version 4 and then picked it up seriously with the development of a new system for Page & Moy Travel in the late 1990’s. This system became our flagship software called Total Solution Travel and was launched in 1999. This was hugely successful in large call centres and at its peak, post 2000, was handling 6% of the total UK’s travel business. Based on PowerBuilder and Oracle it was hugely scalable and the resilience of PowerBuilder set it apart from its rivals for Up Time. One customer, TV Travelshop, ran the system in their call centre on a small Citrix server farm with 500+ concurrent users. Their business ran 24/7 and the PB application just kept working.

Powersoft continued with its core business as a consultancy and developing bespoke systems and specialised in PowerBuilder. We positioned ourselves as the premier consultancy for PowerBuilder in the world. We went from strength to strength developing relationships with Financial services companies supporting their PowerBuilder systems and now have a great portfolio of clients on support. We pride ourselves in breathing new life into the customers existing PB applications and saving them a fortune not having to re-develop in new technologies. This money can be spent on “real” business benefit enhancing the solutions and improving their business processes.

In May 2015 we bought Mainstay a Hotel Property Management system, this is installed in over 100 hotels in the UK. We took this on as a strategic product that fitted well with our Travel and Leisure vertical focus. Being developed in PowerBuilder it is, needless to say, perfect for our skill set. We scrapped the Web synchronization solution that was built using dot net technologies on an out dated framework because it was proving to be too unreliable and was loosing data. We rewrote this using PB running as a service and it has been solid ever since.

PowerBuilder has had a major impact on our business and the path we have taken. We see a long term future for PowerBuilder and are committed to its success going forward.

As Technical Director for Powersoft I am very proud to run an I.T company that has reached this milestone. Many have fallen by the wayside over the years so for us to achieve 30 years is a great testimony to the quality of service we give our customers. We have only achieved this with the use of PowerBuilder as it allows us to deliver solid cost effective solutions. We are looking forward to the 40 year milestone in a decades time. I am sure that we will still be using PowerBuilder, especially now that Appeon will be driving it forward.

David Peace