FourGen® Software Technologies, Inc.
Welcome to the FourGen History Webpage !
Visit Gillani Inc. Website - Current FourGen/Endura Owner
FourGen Position By Gary Gagliardi, 1996
Quotes from some of our customers using FourGen:
"...been
using the FourGen Business Software for approximately 10 years... One of the
main reasons we purchased this software was because it was easy to modify to
fit our business model... We have been very impressed with the people at
Gillani - from sales to project teams, and feel very confident that our
decision to work with Gillani and upgrade to V8.1 will pay dividends for a
long time."
- Controller , A Large Electronics Retailer.
"We chose FourGen Software because although we were small we
wanted to be able to scale our management information system as we
grew..... We chose FourGen Software because we needed the 'Modifiability
by Design' concept. We did not want to reinvent the basic 70% of the code
that is the same everywhere, but we did need to make the last 30% exactly
fit our needs..... We have been using Redhat Linux in production for more
than 2 years and are very happy with it."
- Operations Manager, An Equipment Manufacturer
FourGen History:
In 1986 Softa Associates changed their name to FourGen®. It was thought to be more appropriate for a company producing technology that was light-years ahead of anything else produced by Softa Associates.
Accounts receivable and order entry modules were developed along with the inventory control and purchasing modules. Filepro products were sold to another company.
FourGen® products were billed as MBD™(Modifiable by Design™). Customers had the source code and could customize it at will.
Maintenance and patching system was developed to supply Bug-Fixes and updates to the customer.
Software was sold in late 80’s and early 90’s mostly through VARs within the north American continent and the international market.
FourGen® had representation through VARs in UK, Germany, South Africa, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Middle East, Australia, India, Japan, Indonesia and many other countries.
Software was referenced to as FourGen® Business Accounting, which was developed up to version 3.83 with corresponding CASE Tools Version 4.12.
Business Accounting Software Modules included GL, AP, AR, FA, Payroll, OE, IC, Replenishment and Purchasing.
Early 90’s saw FourGen® produce an Enterprise version starting with FourGen® Version 4.0. The target customers were mid-market and large corporations. GL Flexkeys and other new functionality like multicurrency, EDI, etc. was developed for enterprises to deploy the software.
By 1995 most Business versions customers were converted to Enterprise version of the software.
FourGen® established a large direct sales force and professional services team to handle the growing customer base.
FourGen® CASE Tools were bundled with Informix-4GL as FORMS from late 1980’s to 1996. This sale of CASE Tools by Informix created hundreds of new customers in the US as well as internationally.
By 1994 a Graphical User Interface (GUI) front-end was developed using Microsoft Windows technology.
Enterprise and CASE Tools Version 5.2 was released in 1996.
Special limited offer for lapsed support under FourGen Passport™ Program 
On January 25, 2002 Gillani acquired from Irista/HK Systems the entire FourGen®/Endura business including all FourGen® software intellectual property rights, copyrights, trademarks, all existing customers/users and VAR/Partner licensing agreements, etc.
Gillani
Announces the Release of Endura iDistribute™ and FourGen®
CASE Tools running Linux on IBM xSeries servers and IBM database software
- New release adds to supported platforms and targets ROI
FourGen Position
By Gary
Gagliardi, 1996
Software Products and Future Development
When you purchase FourGen Software products, you are buying a process as well as a product. The technology in which our product is created allows us both to rapidly advance our software and to make enhancements available without delay.
Your software should be flexible. You should not have to replace it in order to get advanced features. You should be able to enhance it gradually, while retaining compatibility with the information it manages. For example, when you purchase a new spreadsheet program, you should still be able to use your existing spreadsheets along with its new features. The issue of compatibility between versions makes the direction of a product’s development at least as important as the products current capabilities. Today’s “best” product, if it cannot support continued development, will soon be surpassed by products that can.
Most accounting software was created with technology that does not lend itself well to ongoing enhancement. Written in COBOL, BASIC, or C without a standardized methodology and developed without relational database technology, these products were difficult to enhance and therefore changed very slowly. Buyers of these products were forded to replace them as they outlived their usefulness. Not only was this expensive, but it also created problems when it came time to transfer data from the old software to the new.
FourGen’s use of 4GL,SQL, and CASE technology and its modifiability-by-design changes this forever. Not only do users and installers gain the ability to modify features to fit specific needs, the product itself can be modified rapidly to add new features. In addition, these new versions can be installed even where the original package has been customized. FourGen’s products can be continuously developed by users and local resellers, whose enhancements can be licensed back to FourGen and made part of the standard product.
Because FourGen differs radically in this respect from other accounting products, some evaluations of our accounting package miss the point. For example, you might reject the package because a screen lacks some familiar type of field, but since our package supports “user-definable” fields, you could add that category of information yourself in something like ten seconds. This kind of flexibility is the focus of much of our development work.
FourGen’s technology has produced software and software enhancements at an unprecedented rate. For the past few years we have produced at least two major product upgrades not only fixes problems with earlier versions, but offers many new features. Features can now be added in less time than it takes for most customers to go through their evaluation process. Some customers have even decided against buying out package because it lacked certain features, only to find that by the time they made a decision, those features had been added to the product.
Most products are not designed to support ongoing change. Years may be spent working on a single upgrade, and the resulting products tend to be so different from the old ones as to be incompatible. This makes moving to these new releases very complicated and expensive. FourGen wants to change that forever with a product cycle that gets new features into the hands of users quickly and easily.
With this approach, product development closely tracks user needs. Companies that spend years on development projects may go off in directions of little value to users. Frequent releases allow us to stay in touch with our customers and the issues important to them. Rather than invest a lot of development time initially, we can offer a minimal version of a feature at first and then develop it further if our users indicate they need it in a more sophisticated form.
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