Forecross History

Founded in 1982, Forecross Corporation started as a high-technology company that designed and developed innovative software to speed up the creation of business programs for the financial services industry in the San Francisco Bay Area.

During the early 1980s, what would come to be called 'fourth generation languages' (4GLs) were gaining in popularity because they allowed novice programmers to develop programs in a fraction of the time it would take using more traditional languages. But, when these 4GLs were used to build complex, high-volume applications for which they weren't originally designed, performance problems ensued and were regularly reported on the front pages of all the computer industry trade papers and magazines.

At that time, the two co-founders of Forecross, Kim Jones and Bonnie Castello, were working with a 4GL previously built by Kim that had the unique characteristic of generating good, well-structured, maintainable COBOL - exactly what their clients wanted. Seeing an opportunity to provide a solution to the 4GL problem, they leveraged their COBOL code generation knowledge and tools to build 'cross-compiler' products - tools that would take code written in the most popular new 4GLs and translate them automatically into functionally equivalent COBOL applications. The company's cross-compilers became the salvation of many mission-critical applications that were functionally accurate but simply could not deliver the throughput or performance promised by the 4GLs in which they were written.

Over time, Forecross added products to support database transformations from non-relational databases such as VSAM, IDMS, Supra and others, into DB2 and most of the other relational databases in use today. Although early clients were primarily large financial corporations and governmental agencies, we gained an excellent reputation by also developing language translation software products for technology companies such as IBM, Cincom Systems and Fujitsu, as well as for systems integrators such as Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Having survived the highs and lows that took out many of our colleagues in the IT software industry such as Y2K, the dotcom washout, and the post-911 economy, we credit our core values, our great people and our excellent clients for our longevity. In 1982, our goal was to create the best automated migration software possible and we accomplished that goal many years ago. But our story isn't over yet as we continue to learn from the experience of our completed projects and the special requests of each of our clients, creating sophisticated, automated solutions that are custom-tailored to fit each client's unique situation and goals.