ASCAR

Established: 1982 Address: 4041 9th Street, Building B

Acton, CA USA 93510 Phone: 800.878.0330

Online: http://www.ascar.com

It is not often that a company can survive and thrive through more than three decades. (More specially, a high technology, software house.) Yet here we are, and we’re doing well. Our organization has overcome many difficult situations. The key to the company’s success has been our great clients. They have stayed with us no matter what, and have never changed to use other vendors.

In the early years, our product was vendor specific. We were born in the Data General family in 1982. At that time, you had to choose a platform, as there were no common environments available. As early as was feasible, we migrated to Unix, as it would be supported by nearly all vendors of the era. We then offered IBM and Unisys solutions. About the turn of this century, Windows became a factor. It was not nearly as reliable, but more and more businesses decided to trust it to run their enterprises. Once again, and another rewrite, we developed a portable product that was 100 percent platform independent.

Now we had a product that would run on any environment the client wanted and clients purchased our product to run on servers of their choice. Supporting your own server meant having a resident MIS person. That was a big expense for organizations trying to cut cost wherever possible. We currently offer the product as a service from a commercial duty server services provider. Most clients now simply pay a modest monthly fee, and use our product over the web. Our next hurdle was “ease of use.” Clients wanted to move from anywhere to anyplace on a screen. They resented having to follow any rule -- they didn’t even want to end an entry with a tab or a C/R (Enter)!

We have been working on the most user-friendly interface available. Our current product allows the user to do anything, in any sequence. The programs will also produce a manual page on contact. And if you are using an order entry, press F1 and you’ll get the manual for order entry.

This is a balancing act. Our legacy clients often dislike losing the ultra- quick and efficient keyboard and function key mode of operation. Some say that when you type in a field and need to use a mouse to navigate elsewhere, it is inefficient and time consuming. However, through the years, we have managed to satisfy both. ASCAR will guide you through the logical sequence when entering a record, but if you choose to click your mouse somewhere, it will follow your lead. This is now by far the most flexible product available. For a Windows user, every single program in our product is 100 percent Windows. For those who want to not use the mouse, ASCAR can also be run from the keyboard.

It has been hard and expensive. R&D costs today are quite high. That is why some of the products available today are so rudimentary. They do little and suggest the user obtains other tools to do accounting, GPS tracking, handle credit cards, and so on.

ASCAR has all the features anyone could ask for and now we have modernized. And we still have all the powerful features that have been added through the years and that have serviced this industry.

About the Author

Dan Citera is the President of ASCAR.•