Let me introduce myself, I’m Jim Beecher the Product Manager for PSQL and database products. The Marketing team has been discussing ways to become more active members of our PSQL Blog - such as restarting the blog to provide you some insight into what we’ve been up to at Pervasive and what my vision is moving forward as the Product Manager.

I’ve been a Pervasive employee for 8+ years and have worked in many departments (Support, Engineering, Sales and Marketing). During my career at PVSW, I have had the opportunity to work with many OEM’s, ISV’s, VAR’s and End users and one theme is common . . . . we’ve been successful because you’ve been an active member of our product direction and quality. As the Product Manager I feel it’s important to get your feedback on the good and bad of our products and direction.

Meeting with our Engineering and Support teams I have stressed the importance of three goals as we move forward with the PSQL family of products:

The first is Quality Assurance. It is important for us to remember that our partners reply on us for thousands of applications and business processes that have been built on the various access models of Pervasive PSQL. Many of these have been in production for many years, so making absolutely sure that your applications will continue to work with new versions and technologies is critical. One way to guarantee this is to finds partners that are interested in being a part of our Pervasive Quality Council, this is a council of individual partners who would want to work with us to evaluate point releases and new products while providing valuable feedback and testing.

The second is Performance, customers have come to reply on Pervasive PSQL as the backend engine that powers applications with a very fast and low footprint database. As we evaluate new technologies like 64-bit and Dual Core we must work jointly with our partners to assure were delivering the maximize performance that is possible.

The third goal is to listen to our customer. As valuable partners, you have a deep understanding of your customer base and their unique requirements. We must work together to deliver solutions that the masses require, yet be flexible enough to honor the individual requests our partners need. An example of this is Windows Vista. We recently completed a Vista Survey where we asked partners about 15 questions on Windows Vista and how they were planning on adopting this technology. That information was then reviewed by our team; Management and Engineering to shape our product direction, this type of data is invaluable in determining product direction.

In closing, I want to leave you with an understanding that the wheels at Pervasive are actively turning and were working on new technologies and features, this includes: 64-bit support, Vista adoption, .NET 2.0 and SQL enhancements.

More details on some of these in future postings!

Please feel free to drop me a line or contribute a response.

Have a great holiday and new years!

Jim