The early years (1992 – 1997)
The heart of Surround Technologies has been together developing custom software in LANSA since 1992. Initially our team developed in a fairly unstructured environment as we responded to individual client needs. During this time we gained business and application development expertise: the catalyst to what our business is based on today.
Birth of Surround Technologies (1997)
In 1997, our team came together to form Surround Technologies. Our development efforts shifted as we began to create a calculated methodology that focused mainly on structure and standards.
Universal Work With (1998)
We developed and released our first tool, the Universal Work With, that could be utilized with LANSA to cultivate standards and further shorten the development timeline. It was used to quickly develop a standard 5250 Work-With Style User Interface and was eventually extended to also provide a Universal Interface for both Windows and Web. This tool was embraced quickly by many of our clients and Surround used it to create our first enterprise applications, FMS and UFTP.
Frameworks For Windows (2000)
Driven by our clients, Surround Technologies was an early adopter of Visual LANSA. We were the first company to release a Visual LANSA developed application, FMS Version 2, into production. Using that development knowledge, in 2000 we released our first rich windows client development tool, Frameworks for Windows. It was the first of its kind to take a Framework-driven approach to Visual LANSA development.
Accelerator For Visual LANSA & Envision (2002)
By 2002, Frameworks for Windows had matured into much more than just a framework and was renamed Accelerator for Visual LANSA. Accelerator quickly gained acceptance among the LANSA community, adding a number of new clients and significant growth to our business. Surround began to develop and release other software applications, including Contact Management, that all shared the same service oriented architecture; all of which could be plugged into all other Accelerator systems. We put this line of products under a single new Envision brand umbrella.
Wizards and Dashboards - Moving beyond LOB development (2004)
With the use of Accelerator we were able to move well beyond the development of the essential Line of Business (LOB) application interface. In fact, that development has become so second nature we often forget to talk about it.
Surround has shifted focus to more business-specific interfaces such as simplifying Complex Business Tasks through the use of Wizards and providing necessary monitoring and decision making information through the use of dashboards.
Accelerator for VL, WoW Edition (2006)
The underlying architecture of Accelerator proved itself again and allowed us to quickly capitalize on the new LANSA WAM technology for providing a rich web user interfaces. Surround integrated Windows-style handling and features with a web browser in the Windows on the Web version of Accelerator. The WOW edition of Accelerator delivers performance levels that rival native desktop applications. A Web application that handles and works like a Windows app, with no screen refresh as you move back and forth through data, liberated our clients from their existing preconceptions about application deployment.
Accelerator for VL, Business Objects and Services Edition (2007)
With further demands on interoperability and integration of outside systems with Accelerator based systems, we broke out the Business Objects and Services portion of Accelerator into its own edition that can be used by itself or in conjunction with the Windows and WoW Editions. The underlying Accelerator architecture championed yet another important business need as it is now possible to produce an agile service oriented system around your data and business processes.
Accelerator for .NET and WPF (2008)
More info about our next evolutionary step coming soon.