Simberon Incorporated

Since 2006, Cincom Systems, Inc. and Simberon Incorporated have had a partnership agreement in place for consulting and training services. This partnership has led to numerous successes with companies who needed assistance with their applications written in Cincom Smalltalk and companies who needed training or an application evaluation to make sure that they were getting the most out of their Cincom Smalltalk solution.

When Unaxis (now Oerlikon) had a critical problem with their silicon manufacturing control software, they contacted Cincom. Cincom worked together with Simberon to trace the problem down. The primary issue was that the version of Cincom Smalltalk they were using was over 10 years old and it wasn’t working properly on the newest versions of the operating systems. Simberon was able to locate the problem and provide a fix which Cincom packaged into a custom virtual machine for the customer. Unaxis was able to continue operating their equipment while they worked in parallel to upgrade the software to the current version of Cincom® VisualWorks®. The result saved Unaxis millions of dollars in lost time and lost productivity. Running on the newer version of the Cincom software allowed them to bring their product to production sooner and realize a quicker return on their investment.

Penn State University’s system for processing university transcript requests was encountering problems on some client computers but not others. Desperate for a fix, they contacted Cincom and once again, Cincom called up Cincom Smalltalk Services Partner Simberon to assist. The Simberon consultant visited the site and within a day had traced down the problem. The fix was installed the next day which worked flawlessly and returned the Transcript system to full operation.

JP Morgan needed a way to integrate their Smalltalk software with other applications. They needed a mechanism to treat their Smalltalk code like a Windows DLL and be able to call it from C programs. Cincom and Simberon provided a solution that allowed a C program to make calls to Smalltalk and to return answers. At the same time, they allowed the image and executable to be combined into a single file for multiple operating systems.

Cargill was having performance problems running VisualWorks on their latest AIX computer systems running on the PowerPC processor. A Simberon consultant traced the problem to the dynamic compilation code in the VisualWorks VM which wasn’t tailored to the latest processors. Working in conjunction with the Cincom engineering staff, they were able to change the VM and dramatically improve the performance of the application.

Desjardins General Insurance was running on an older version of VisualWorks and was still using the ENVY version control system. They needed to move forward to the latest versions of VisualWorks to use many new features provided and to solve several critical problems they had with the old system. Cincom and Simberon worked together with the developers at Desjardins to upgrade their application from VisualWorks 5i.1 to VisualWorks 7.7. Once the application was upgraded successfully, they provided training to the developers of the project on the new version of VisualWorks and the numerous changes that had been made in the development environment.

The combination of Cincom Systems powerful products partnered with Simberon Incorporated consulting services offers Cincom Smalltalk customers the skill and the resources to solve difficult problems and to provide a high quality consulting service to bring to bear on any aspect of the project.

Who is Simberon?

Simberon’s corporate office is located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and was founded in 1994 by David Buck to provide object oriented consulting and training services to software development companies in Canada and across the world. Specializing in Smalltalk development, Simberon has assisted customers in upgrading their applications and solving difficult problems to allow their development to continue. Simberon also offers introductory and advanced level training courses for Smalltalk, Java, and .NET developers.

Simberon’s clients include Export Development Canada (EDC), Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and Desjardins General Insurance. Simberon produces a weekly podcast called the Simberon Design Minute and has produced numerous videos promoting the Smalltalk language and development environment. Since 2006, Simberon has been an official partner of Cincom Systems and has worked together with Cincom to offer technical assistance to many Cincom Smalltalk clients.