About Robelle

What Has Been Happening at Robelle

HP stopped selling the HP 3000 and will no longer support it after the end of 2006, but Robelle confirms continued support for MPE. Of course, we are also ready to help you plan for the future, and our products have supported HP-UX for a decade. We were the first HP 3000 tool vendor to embrace HP Eloquence with an upgrade to Suprtool for HP-UX.

Suprtool and Qedit: still enhancing, always backward compatible Homesteading: we will support MPE as long as needed Migrating: same powerful commands on HP-UX Bob Green, Robelle President

The Company Corporate overview - Fast Facts. The 3000 NewsWire Interview with Robelle President Bob Green. Company history: Read our 15 year retrospective from 1992! And read our reports from past HP World conferences. Read about Robelle on 3kworld: Building a Community The Products Suprtool Database Handyman Qedit for MPE and HP-UX Qedit for Windows A white paper on how we Build Better Software Reach Robelle By Mail, Phone or Email

Responding to a Shrinking HP 3000 Market

We had been watching the market prospects for MPE decline for years, although the 3000 continued to be one of the easiest IT platforms to develop for and operate. Starting in January 2001, we set as our goal to be "the best HP 3000 vendor possible", even if that meant that we would grow smaller over the years. In anticipation, we began cutting back on expenses (except for R&D programmers!) and simplifying our in-house procedures.

Outsourcing

We outsourced technical support to Allegro Consultants (www.allegro.com), after 9 months of training and phase-in. This gives our customers access to a highly-qualified group of 3000 experts, with backup for vacations and holidays. And the Robelle R&D team is still available for tricky questions. A side benefit of this permanent relationship was that it gave Robelle access to the skills of senior people at Allegro, especially Stan Sieler, Steve Cooper, and Gavin Scott. This has been extremely valuable with our own tricky technical problems!

Migration Experiences

Therefore, we converted the financial portion of our homegrown IT systems from MPE to a standard accounting package on Windows. This unexpectedly ugly and time-consuming migration gave us a much more sympathetic attitude toward customers' migration woes! We would also like to try migrating one of our in-house applications from MPE to HP-UX with Eloquence, but we would have to justify the time/expense as a learning experience, since it makes more sense financially to leave the applications on MPE for another 5 years.

Small Team Actually Produces More!

• Web site: We have been doing continuous news updates since November 2000, allowing us to generate a technical newsletter for customers every month, instead of just 4-6 times a year. This is not just information on Robelle, but information on the HP 3000, the other software products that work on that platform, and the methods of migrating to HP-UX.

• Suprtool: We implemented features that users have been craving for years. Perhaps the most exciting was update from a table, but also subtotals on fields, totals, record counters, exporting in XML format, performance improvements, cleaning of data fields, and a many-to-many Join command in Suprlink.

• Qedit: we added support for the HTML, XML, JAVA and QSL languages, we boosted the performance and we improved the handling of COBOL tags. For users migrating from Quad, we added the Colcopy, Colmove and MergeJ commands. For Qedit/UX, we re-implemented Visual mode for HP-UX 11 where HP removed the key block-mode API which we had been using in the past. And in Qedit for Windows, we added Syntax Coloring based on the programming language.

Small and Nimble - Able to Grab Opportunities

Ten years ago we ported our products from MPE to HP-UX, so we are ready to support migrating customers. But our first love is still the HP 3000 and we intend to support it as long as customers are willing to pay us. We don't expect our HP-UX business from migrations to ever reach the volume of the MPE software business. And we don't expect to be in the migration consulting business.

The Robelle Staff

On "Sales and Admin" is Tammy Roscoe in B.C., also known as the Energizer Bunny. Backup singers for Tammy are Fran Glasgow and Bobsy Hendriks who alternate days. Together this team handles sales questions, product delivery, invoicing, receivables, and lots more.

On "Suprtool and Qedit" is Neil Armstrong, who has been doing the R&D for Suprtool for the last 8 years. Neil also supervised the transition to Allegro tech support and, since he is one hour ahead of East Coast time, answers many early morning tech support questions. Neil is a key contributor.

On "Troubleshooting" is Mary Ann Green, whose past experience managing over a hundred union employees made it possible for her to see what could be done at Robelle. She gets much of the credit for the streamlining of our procedures that now allows us to operate with such a small team.

Our "Leader" is Bob Green, founder of Robelle and sole owner since David Greer sold his shares. Bob tackles challenging programming projects for Qedit and Suprtool, dreams up marketing ideas, writes papers, generates our web site and newsletters, and does the minimum administrative work possible (although it is always too much). Bob handles most of the marketing tasks, although he has been outsourcing some of the details to freelancers on elance.com

Neil, Mary Ann and Bob work out of an office on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean. They keep in touch with the team in B.C. and our worldwide customer base via email, instant messaging, and some use of the telephone.

Robelle is well prepared for whatever the future brings and we would like to thank all the customers who have supported us through our restructuring.