ne of the more challenging aspects of running a software development company the size of BASIS is balancing resources for product enhancement with resources for product development. While BASIS is the world leader in Business Basic development tools (thanks to you, our Customers), we are still a small business with only 56 full-time employees at our headquarters, including tech support, operations, sales and marketing, quality assurance, human resources and finance personnel in addition to software development personnel.

Last year, we made the decision to continue enhancing our BBx® family of products while simultaneously working on the development of BBj™ (patent pending). Over the last nine months, we have further enhanced our PRO/5® and Visual PRO/5® products with

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High Recoverable Files and Related Utilities     64-bit file capability with significant performance enhancement     Grid Management Libraries (attached file functionality)     Improved GUI features     Easier FLEXlm install     New Conversion utilities for other major Business Basic languages     Socket Support

Additionally, we siphoned some resources to develop our own Web-based, e-commerce application for our Customers. We know this is our and your future, and it wouldn't make sense for us to be touting this without doing it ourselves and using our own products.

Even with this aggressive enhancement, our progress on BBj advanced and we are preparing to release the first component of BBj, the BBj Data Server™, which includes:

• BBj Data Server and the BBj Enterprise Manager
• BBj JDBC/ODBC drivers with thin client capability

Still left for us to complete development of and beta test are the BBj Interpreter, BBjIDE, BBj AppServer™ and the Web-browser-enabled BBj Thin Client™.

In our development of BBj, we have also been challenged by the fact that Java is a cutting-edge technology. BBj depends on the latest Java releases for functionality and performance, and this has had an impact on our beta process, time line and complexity of coding. But I believe the difficulties with cutting-edge development are more than compensated by the benefits we gain from Java. BBj allows all Business Basic developers to ride the crest of massive engineering efforts expended by other Java developers in areas that BASIS alone, with our current resources, could not offer.

As always, it is our goal to make quality products to help you leverage new technologies and deliver solutions that meet the ever-expanding requirements of the business application marketplace. BASIS is working hard to meet that goal.

George Hight,
President