We are excited and grateful to celebrate Synergex’s 40^th year in business.

We started by delivering applications to local businesses in the Sacramento area 40 years ago today. Shortly after opening our doors, founders Ken Lidster and Mike Morrissey got frustrated with having to rewrite perfectly good applications to take advantage of the latest DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) hardware and/or operating systems each time DEC came out with a new kit. This inspired them to create DBL (Data Business Language), which could take any version of DEC’s DIBOL language and simply recompile and relink to run on any DEC platform. This dramatically changed our—and ultimately our customers’—direction and put us on the map, as they say.

DBL was the first portable development language within DEC. In the ‘80s, Synergex (then named DISC) also became the first company to make it possible to migrate applications from a proprietary environment to the then emerging Unix/Xenix and MS-DOS systems. In the ‘90s, we enabled migration to Windows; at the turn of the century, to the web, APIs, and RDBMSs (SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC access, etc.); and in the teens, to .NET. Today we provide a migration path to mobile devices.

Forty years ago, very few of us, if any, could have imagined how today’s computing environment would look. Fewer still could have imagined that the applications they were developing would be able to run on all of these emerging platforms—but they can! Last week, I saw a DBL source code file dated 1976 run in .NET and on an Apple iPhone. Again, who could have imagined?!

Since our early shift to providing software development tools to application developers, our commitment to “portability” has never wavered. We have remained steadfast in our mission to deliver software tools and services to help our customers take advantage of current and relevant computing. Our products have been the ultimate “future proofing” to the significant investment customers have made in enterprise solutions.

And while many companies that were well known back in the day are no longer on the scene, we continue to grow and thrive more than ever—thanks in large part to our customers. Many of our ISV customers are the leaders in their respective vertical markets and continue to maintain their top positions and expand their install base. Some of our direct end users are household names with north of $100 billion in annual sales, who leverage  our tools to help them prosper. Without their support and partnership, I wouldn’t be writing this. So here’s a big shout out to all of our customers, with the biggest thanks there is.

Lastly, a company doesn’t grow and thrive without the dedication and hard work of its employees—both past and current. We have been—and continue to be—blessed to have very talented and driven people contribute to our success these past 40 years. Several, like myself, have been here for the lion’s share of our existence. But we also have many new employees who represent the future—and the next 40+ years of Synergex. Just as 40 years ago we couldn’t imagine what our industry would look like today, it’s impossible to envision what it will be like 40 years from now. Regardless, I feel very confident that Synergex will be here for our customers and their future generations, supporting whatever future computing environments come along.