Remain Puts Itself Back On The Map In The United States

July 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

Remain Software is based in The Netherlands, which is in Europe. That may be news to some of the company’s American customers, which is why the provider of software change management (SCM) solutions for IBM i is opening up a new office in the United States.

It may be difficult to find The Netherlands (sometimes called Holland) on a map. It’s a relatively small country, a little bigger than the state of Maryland, tucked into the northwest corner of the continent, right next to two other low countries – Belgium and Luxemborg – that geographically challenged Americans may also find easy to miss.

“The Netherlands. What is The Netherlands?” Remain Software CEO Marko Kok asked, somewhat rhetorically, during a chat with IT Jungle at COMMON‘s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas. “Sometimes Remain’s customers have the feeling it’s far away.”

The physical distance between Remain’s IBM i customers in the United States and the company’s headquarters in Dukatenburg – about 45 kilometers south of the country’s capital, Amsterdam – shouldn’t matter as much now that that IBM i veteran Laura Hamway has been tapped to head Remain’s new American headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

“We see more interest for our company in the United States, and we think it’s the right moment to have this office in the U.S., to become closer to the customer,” Kok said.

Remain previously had been represented in the United States by Joan McKittrick of Solutions First, which was Remains’ North American distributor previously. However, McKittrick recently retired, leaving a gap in Remain’s coverage. Hamway, an IBM i consultant who spearheaded the creation of the MAGIC user group, was happy to jump in and team up with Kok and his team.

Hamway will keep busy as the new managing director for Remain Software USA. She will be involved in implementation, sales, training, and even some product development – or at least communicating fixes or new feature request from TD/OMS and Gravity users. “I’ve got my hands in everything,” she said.

She will also continue development of her IBM i-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, dubbed dbFunnel, through her own company, Hamway Software Solutions. “For me it’s perfect,” she said in San Antonio. “I still get my tool. I still get to do what I like to do. So it’s a good transition.”

Hamway will also be instrumental in maintaining Remain’s partnership with Fresche. The two companies work together around X-Analysis, the well-regarded impact analysis tool used by many IBM i shops. Remain also sells an impact analysis tool, but it doesn’t do everything that X-Analysis does. When Remain customers need more functionality than their product can offer, they work with Fresche to bring X-Analysis to bear on the problem.

For his part, Kok is happy to have somebody with Hamway’s technical ability join the Remain team. “It’s good to have somebody on board who understands development work,” he said.

Remain recently unveiled two minor releases of its main products, TD/OMS, which is its flagship change management software, and Gravity, which helps automate workflow for developers.

The big news in TD/OMS version 10 milestone 3 is the addition of a REST API. The company says that this will give customers the capability to generate Open API specifications from their database definitions. The company says the real power of the REST API comes by using it in combination with the LXR ReST Provider Generator by ReST4i, which is a new REST API play founded by former X-Analysis developer Stuart Milligan.

On the Gravity front, the release of version 3.03 brings enhancements in the areas of multi-tenancy, multi-language, and multiplatform source cross-referencing. Customers can now view server logs from the Web, while integration with Apache Cassandra NoSQL database provides more storage options for Gravity users.

For more info on the new releases, see the company’s website at remainsoftware.com.

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