Apollo 6 - Thank You Letter

December 17th, 2001

Dear Apollo Users,

I would like to extend a big thank you to everyone that helped develop and test Apollo 6.0 (formerly 5.2) making it our best technology release ever.

Over the past 15 months, our development team logged over 15,000 hours and sacrificed countless weekends in developing Apollo 6, not including the time invested by our beta testers. In addition to several key new features, over 500 improvements were made across the entire 5.x product line.

The focus of 6.0 was not to add features, but rather to improve the features already in Apollo. This turned out to be much easier said than done. We believe that making Apollo 6 a rock-solid release rather than a feature-rich release was the best decision we could have made. Customers have been telling us that they want less "bells and whistles" and more substance and I can proudly say that version 6.0 delivers.

I want to thank Med Shakeri, our Vice President and CTO for his leadership and work ethic throughout this entire project. Med's contributions are fundamental to the entire Apollo product line. Med went as far as to postpone his wedding in order to help get Apollo 6 released!

I want to thank Cesar Vega for his dedication and hard work. Cesar's primary responsibility is the Apollo SQL engine, but his contributions to the entire product line were invaluable and have helped make 6.0 a big success. I want to thank Mike Orlov for his hard work in developing the new SDE 6.0. Mike is in charge of Vista's core data technology. His excellent programming skills have brought our SDE 6.0 to an entirely new level of reliability.

In addition to our development team, I wish to formally thank the following key people for testing and for providing us feedback: Rich Dlin, Jerry Clancy, Tim Davies, Daniel Schaer, Scott Prokopetz, Peter Grimshaw, Ian Branch, Jeff Day, Tony Wood, Scott Martin, Del Geist, Kevin Boswell, Dana Dill, Tim Creagh, Albert Brandmeier, Brett Shearer, Günter Kieninger, Simon Braver, Israel Nemlich, Mike Young, Louis-Philippe Engelmann, Sunil Prasad, Bill King and René van Rullen. Apollo 6.0 users worldwide owe these people gratitude for their contributions.

As always, we look forward to continuing to deliver great products and services and we wish each Apollo user great success with our new 6.0 release. As always, your success is our success.

Sincerely,
Anthony Carrabino
President/CEO