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Elite Software Company A Profile |
| General History Elite Software Company Limited was incorporated in 1981 by the current directors, and its principal activities are the design, production and sale of computer software and hardware, with the emphasis on software. The Company is small, and concentrates on software design, both for in-house projects and outside contract work. Financially trading is generally profitable, and the Company utilises its own reserves to support medium and long term projects. There are no major creditors.
The Company's first products were programming utilities for the Apple ][ computer and a word processor, Format-40, aimed at the commercial market, all products being sold by a third party under license. Some contract work was also done, mainly communications modules, also for the Apple ][. An improved word processor, Format-80, was then developed. This was sold under license by a third party, and later marketed directly by Elite Software. It was very successful and gained a substantial fraction of the market. An American company, Kensington Microware, licensed the program for production and sale in the United States of America. World-wide sales ran into many thousands of copies. A bilingual Anglo-Arabic version was developed, which was marketed in the Middle East by Science and Information Technology Limited trading as Diwan. Sales of Format-80 declined only when Apple discontinued production of the Apple //e to concentrate on the Macintosh. In the mid 1980's the company developed the Wildcard, an interface card with utility software designed for backing up copy protected software on the Apple // family by dumping RAM to disc. This sold well in the UK, but was particularly successful in the United States, where it was marketed by Eastside Software, and became the market leader. A second version was produced which included program debugging utilities. The rights to the product were later sold to Central Point Software, later bought by Symantec. All the above software was written in assembler, with the occasional BASIC module. With the advent of the IBM PC, Elite Software wrote a new word processor for the PC in 'C' with additional spelling checker, mailing list/database and indexing modules, named Format-PC. An Anglo-Arabic version was also developed and again was sold by Diwan. UK sales were satisfactory although modest. Like most horizontal products from small software houses the program was unable to compete with the large marketing budgets from the major American companies. The spelling checker module from Format-PC was extracted as a stand-alone program and two other producers of word processing programs licensed it for integration into their own packages. The whole of Format-PC was licensed to a major UK database producer for integration into their own software. Elite Software also produced under contract various modules for the new combined application.
Using experience gained from text processing and bilingual software Elite Software Company started developing programs for the media market, in particular newspaper publishers, using the Apple Macintosh as the platform. The first program was NewsNet Manager, a system for receiving text stories from wire service providers such as Reuters, reformatting them, analysing the contents and forwarding the final reformatted file to the correct destination on a network. The system was developed in HyperCard, using extensions written in 'C' where necessary. It was initially marketed and produced under license by Diwan, and later sold directly by Elite Software, although mainly through dealers and OEMs. The Middle East was a significant marketplace, due to the software's inherent ability to handle multilingual text. Other projects for the media industry were produced mainly for Diwan. These included PictureNet, a picture desk system, for which Elite Software Company was entirely responsible. A modem control and file reception/transmission module was developed for Diwan's CommsNet II, including support for ZMODEM and a proprietary protocol tailored to the needs of publications with several offices world-wide. These projects were developed in 'C'. In "C++" a number of image input and output modules were written for Diwan's picture archiving system, MAPS. In the middle of 1995 Diwan went into receivership. PictureNet and CommsNet were acquired from the receivers and were sold and are still supported. Customers included national and regional newspapers both in the UK and abroad. A replacement general editorial browsing and editing tool, "Media Browser", was developed. An in-house project currently being developed in collaboration with a consultant from a major American research hospital is FirstPass. This performs preliminary analysis on time slice images, usually from MR and CT scans. As expected for such a specialised product, sales so far have been modest, but include an international drugs company and university hospitals. Owing to the complex nature of the application, FirstPass is only available directly from Elite Software.
With the increased use of the Windows operating systems in the publishing industry all new projects are being designed for use with either Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Currently this includes the new version of NewsNet which now includes image support. There are three modules, serial reception, file processing and client browsing, and are available on both platforms. They are installations at sites in Europe, Russia, the Middle East and North America. The format of the data files is being maintained across platforms so that a user with both types of machines may use the same packages to access the same data on both. As with previous products it is planned that sales are achieved through resellers and system integrators. Details of the new products, NewsNet Receiver, Media Processor and NewsNet Editor are available at Elite Software Company’s web site.
Several years ago Elite Software Company was approached by another company in the communications market to help develop a modem for use over radio and cellular telephone networks, on a contract basis. The hardware design of the modem and much of the onboard modem programming was done by Elite Software. Modem programming was performed in assembler. PC control software has been developed by Elite Software Company in 'C'. The project was taken over by another company, but Elite Software was still used for hardware design and a large fraction of the software development, including the design and implementation of simulation packages in "C++" on a PC, to emulate 50747 and 38002 CPUs and their associated hardware. Modem development has now moved to another company, ISO9000 registered, company. Many of the aims have been derived from the previous modem development, but new hardware and software was produced from scratch. Elite Software Company was used mainly for application development within the modem itself. This was coded in "C".
Elite Software Company has a flexible attitude to the type of projects it accepts, but is particularly suited to pure software development. The programmers have considerable experience of the Macintosh and PC platforms, and programming in 'C' and 'C++'. Designing and implementing small (less than 20 workstations) network projects has been undertaken, and there is experience in adding systems and advising on larger networks. In addition the experience gained in the publishing industry allows the Company to find and implement solutions to unusual problems in most computer related fields.
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