The primary focus of our business is information systems software. This involves computers and communication which have given rise to some of the most controversial issues of our age. On this page we offer our own editorial contribution.

WISL Grows

    Late in 1991 WISL experienced a major restructuring in ownership and management. Bud Walker's decision to leave the company precipitated an ownership that left Wayne Montgomery and Al Price and added Brian Parker as a shareholder. Al Price was planning to take an extended hiatus from the working world to become a mariner in the Caribbean and Wayne Montgomery had decided to leave the University of Waterloo to devote full-time to WISL so Wayne assumed the role of President. At about the same time WISL transferred back the rights to market and support the bookstore retail management system that had been acquired initially for the University of Waterloo but WISL remained in the retail market with U of W's WATPOS point of sale system and its bookstore customers.

    Major changes had been underway with WISL's chosen development environment since the late 1980's. The Multi-value world had been primarily served by vanilla mini-computers supplemented by firmware(a circuit board) that provided the platform for the operating system/database management system. There were several major implementations from which WISL had selected the Ultimate Systems offering that ran primarily on DEC and Honeywell mini-computers. By the mid-80's a rival computing environment that had originated in the academic world and had become the main platform for a fledgling communications network called "the internet" was beginning to find markets in the commercial world. UNIX was attractive because it was a fully software operating system that was capable of being implemented on a variety of hardware platforms and nobody seemed to own it. With the burgeoning popularity of UNIX the question in the Multi-value world became: How do we integrate with the new "Open" environment? Two approaches were adopted, the easiest was to implement the Multi-value environment as a process under the UNIX operating system. Ultimate's version was called ULT-PLUS and the University of Waterloo decided to acquire this implementation running under IBM's AIX version of UNIX.

    Until 1991 WISL had been buying time on University of Waterloo platforms and those of Ultimate Canada to do its development. Experience with U of W's IBM RS6000/AIX system encouraged WISL to acquire a similar platform as it's first server while employing Ultimate's ULT-PLUS as the multi-value environment . A couple of dumb terminals were purchased as workstations. The second approach to integrating with UNIX( abandoning the OS features of the multi-value environment and adopting UNIX as the OS with all of the multi-value features in the DBMS) was soon available and WISL adopted the UniVerse implementation from VMark to run on its AIX server. UniVerse quickly supplanted ULT-PLUS as the main WISL development environment. 

    By the late 80's the PC was beginning to attract serious interest as a business information systems platform.  Solution providers were beginning to generate offerings that ran on the DOS single user operating system and a breed of networking products(Novell etc) evolved in an attempt to address the requirement to share data amongst multiple concurrent users. Of course the desktop world(Microsoft) would not truly satisify this need until the development of a legitimate multi-user operating system(that Microsoft arrogantly termed NT - New Technology) which arrived in the early 90's. The multi-value world was also experimenting with the PC as a server platform and WISL acquired Pick Systems' totally software implementation and installed it on an AT clone. Although slow by today's standards the platform did offer a legitimate capability for implementing a multi-user application at a relatively low cost for the hardware. It also provided WISL with a portable(about 70 lbs.) platform for giving remote product demonstrations. The PC was also becoming a popular option as a workstation and WISL adopted the AccuTerm product from AccuSoft to provide terminal emulation access to its text based applications. WISL further developed the user interface in its Screen Control Application Development System to take advantage of the features of the PC including colour and screen navigation.

    WISL began the analysis of Triangle Traffic's information systems needs in 1985. The major goal was to automate the freight rating process. Agreements between shippers and carriers can involve a variety of basic arrangements often supplemented by potential conditions that can result in additional charges( called accessorials). The result of three years of development working with Earl Taylor(President of TTS) and his staff was a data base that provided for recording the characteristics of the major types of rating arrangements that carriers offer to shippers and an automated process to evaluate a specified shipment to determine the applicable rate determined by calculation and reference to the rate structures stored in the data base. This capability was placed within a framework that provided for computerized support of the major clerical activity of Triangle's business, the audit and payment of freight bills for shippers. The implementation of TACS(Transportation Audit Control System) in 1988 proved very successful in addressing the intended goals.

    Attendance at various freight management trade shows and other marketing efforts revealed that auto-rating software had a potential market far wider that third party freight auditing. Clearly there were far more carriers and even more shippers that were potential customers of the auto-rating facility. In 1992 a development effort was initiated to generalize TACS and reorganize the software modules to make it attractive to the broader market. FAIS(Freight Analysis Information System) was the result and two major carriers(Cottrell Transport and Challenger Motor Freight) became early customers. FAIS became the cornerstone for all of WISL's development efforts that followed in the logistics marketplace. More carriers and some large shippers were added to the customer base in the mid-90's.

    The early 90's were also busy times for the retail management side of WISL's business. The C/PRM(Component/Package Retail Management System) and TOG(Telephone Order Management System) were developed and Bank Authorization through the register was implemented for WISL retail customers with the Bank of Montreal. A product that addressed important requirements of both freight management and retail management customers also evolved during this period. WISL's entry in the EDI marketplace was initially developed with the involvement of another third party logistics company, Tempus Freight Management Services. A major contributor to the successful deployment of WISL EDIT was Bryon LaHaise, President of Tempus.

    The first half of the last decade of the 20th century also marked WISL's transition from the harware centric business model to one where software solutions became the major focus of its marketing efforts. Computing hardware platforms, even servers for small and medium sized organizations, were becoming commodity items where competition was dictating very small profit margins. Value Added Resellers(VARS) were being forced to offer competitive software solutions as the main attraction. Specialized hardware(point of sale peripherals or barcode scanning devices) still offered descent margins but computing platforms offered little to second level sellers. As software development had always been WISL's strength, the company was well prepared for the industry trend.