UC4 Sales Rocket Skyward in the United States

Cross-platform job scheduling software supplier UC4 Software said last week that its sales in the United States exploded by 80 percent in the first quarter, with license sales up by 87 percent. UC4 is a privately held company, so it doesn’t report its financials officially, but said that worldwide sales were $8.6 million in the first quarter and that it now had in excess of 750 customers.

Last year, UC4, which is headquartered in Germany, said that it was going to start moving into the U.S. market, and appointed Mark Loehr as the chief operating officer of the U.S. unit. Loehr has been building up the sales operations in the country, and has been building up the sales organization here.

Notably, in March, The Carlyle Group, the politically connected venture capital fund that buys up defense contractors and IT players that has former IBM chairman and chief executive Louis Gerstner as its new chairman, acquired UC4 to add to its portfolio of tech companies. The acquisition has not had an impact on sales, but it gives UC4 the economic means to expand its operations worldwide.

As Loehr explained it to me, companies are getting tired of having job scheduling software tied to a particular platform; they want to give system administrators a single tool that can schedule jobs on all kinds of boxes. The UC4 Server that is at the heart of the product runs on Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux (on X86, X64, and mainframe servers). The software also has deployment agents for other platforms, which are called UC4 Executors, that link into just about any server platform and operating system you can think of, including OS/400 and i5/OS. It also hooks into Oracle databases on Windows and Unix boxes, SQL Server on Windows, and DB2 on Windows, Unix, and z/OS. UC4 has substantial expertise in job control languages, and it can certainly port its code to run natively on the System i and i5/OS platform. And I explained to Loehr that this would probably be a good idea, given the over 200,000 OS/400 shops out there in the world who like to run native software and the increasing number of shops who are mixing operating systems inside their iSeries and System i boxes. I think UC4 could boost sales even further by going native, but if you want the company to do the development, you will have to ask for it. These things are always made possible by customer demand, not editorial demand.