Mike Ruane, President and CEO, Revelation Software
With the 2020s already halfway over, it’s remarkable that the MultiValue (MV) community is not only still alive but continuing to thrive. Database software itself has only existed since the early 1960s, and many MV systems trace their “Day 0” back to January 31, 1967. That places MV among the earliest database technologies in existence—yet here we are, decades later, still building, deploying, and supporting mission-critical applications.
How has this been possible? The answer is simple, though not easy: constant improvement and evolution. MV has never stood still. Revelation Software, for example, was originally designed for the then-new IBM PC in the early 1980s. From those early standalone systems, it evolved to support networks, client/server architectures, web deployment, and now cloud-based environments.
Each transition brought challenges, but also opportunities—and the platform adapted every time.
Today, we continue to see a wide range of deployments in the field. Some clients still run OpenInsight applications on standalone machines or traditional networks, while others are installing brand-new systems using those same models. Increasingly, however, customers are running OpenInsight through the cloud.
We view the cloud not as a trend, but as a fundamental part of the future, and we are actively developing more cloud-ready and cloud-accessible versions of OpenInsight to meet those needs.
At the same time, we recognize a very real challenge: Many of the “old-time” MV developers—the people who built the foundations of these systems—are retiring or moving on. This creates a gap in institutional knowledge that cannot be ignored. To address it, we’ve been enhancing and modernizing our help files and documentation, expanding Wikipedia pages, improving explanations, and providing more practical sample code. In parallel, we’ve been working with various AI models so that future developers and power users can more easily understand, support, and extend their applications.
While it’s true that every technology eventually reaches an end point, we don’t see the end of Revelation—or OpenInsight—anytime soon. The platform continues to evolve, and so do we. Rest easy. We’ve got you covered.