Francesco Paola, senior consultant with JYACC, a software tools vendor in New York City, said, "The presentation area was full most of the time. We had more leads in the first day here than we had all of last year. And the level of people we talked to was more technical."
Dale Hempel, channel marketing representative with Distributed Processing Technology of Maitland, FL, spent his time at the show discussing the company's SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) controller cards and storage management software with potential customers. DPT is a technology partner with The Santa Cruz Operation and has its technology built into SCO's operating system products. "SCSI is now coming of age," Hempel said. "You have a lot of devices that you can put on SCSI." His company comes to UniForum every year and plans to be back next year. "We really like UniForum," he said.
Joseph Burns, vendor relations consultant with Candle Corp., a systems management software company in Santa Monica, CA, represented his company at its first UniForum show. Candle, which had previously marketed systems and performance management products for mainframes, is now developing an open systems product." I met a lot of people who weren't mainframe-centric at all," Burns said. "They understand the stability of our company. There was a good mix of customers from the enterprise management level and the UNIX level as well. This is a big show for us and we're going to Dallas [for UniForum '95]," he said.
Kenneth Jeras, registered technical manager for software development tools vendor Cincom of Cincinnati, OH, described his UniForum experience as "pretty positive." He said that at this year's show, the third he has attended, he saw more system managers who "want to put the pieces of the puzzle together" and integrate the various components of an open systems solution. His own purpose was "to get an idea of what's going on in the open systems area, and what competition there is out there for our products." From what he saw this year, UNIX products now seem to be more affordable, Jeras said, especially for what he called "the mid-level buyer."