About Xansoft

The Company

Xansoft Pty Ltd (ACN 006 383 544) was acquired as a shelf company in 1986.  It is jointly owned by Ms Dania Greer and John Owens. Xansoft commenced business in the mid 90's, replacing our previous company in a similar line of business and dating from 1984.

We thought the name was an attraction at the time, however in this era of online business directories "X" puts us down the bottom of most lists so we have to try harder to get noticed! The name is now rusted on and we won't change it. By the way, it's pronounced "Zansoft".

Our business is computers - all types and sizes.  We are focused on design and programming for both websites and commercial applications, mostly with database backends. Naturally, this reflects our own interests and skills. 

For further information you can contact us here...

Bio - Dania Greer

Dania has more than 30 years experience in IT.  With an emphasis on IBM and compatible mainframes she spent many years in performance analysis and capacity planning. After learning Fortran at school she worked her way through university (UCLA) with various jobs from data entry to JCL[1], Assembler and PL/I programming.  The systems included student record and enrolment management.

Dania worked for Amdahl Corporation for six years.  Her role as a systems engineer specialising in marketing support brought her to Australia where she now resides.  Dania carried out pre-sales benchmarking and the post-sales support required for Amdahl’s mainframe computers to meet their contracted performance targets.

Dania has also contracted to companies such as IBM GSA, Shell, United Energy and Ansett.

More recent experience includes ten years with Telstra, much of it in corporate marketing and compliance areas.

Skills acquired from her mainframe days are:  -

•  SAS[2] and SQL programming languages.
•  Teradata Relational Data Base Management system and its toolkits.
• Data Warehouse environments and ETL[3] requirements.
• IBM Mainframe environment, particularly JCL, TSO[4] and performance analysis.
• Microsoft Office product range including VBA[5] for MS-Excel and MS-Access.

As a partner in Xansoft, Dania specialises in web-based design and programming, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript (with both MooTools and jQuery), AJAX, PHP and MySQL.  She also provides skills in web page search engine optimisation using Web-CEO software.

Bio – John Owens

John's background was originally in software problem resolution having worked for IBM for nine years supporting mainframe operating systems.   The tools were hundreds of printed technical manuals, computer generated flow charts and source code on microfiche.  Most of the operating systems were written in Assembler although a language called PL/S was being used for some components that weren’t time critical.  The C language was buried deep in Bell Labs.

After leaving IBM, John spent 2 years with the Northern Territory Electricity Commission as Commercial Manager Alice Springs Area and after moving to Melbourne in 1982 returned to computers and joined Prime Computer which was a fierce but much smaller competitor to DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), the dominant player in the mini-computer market at the time.Later roles were either technical or personnel management with Idaps Australia, Paxus and Mera Consulting. DBASE and RBase were 4th generation languages (4GL's) running under the DOS operating system and these were the mainstay of sofware development up to the early 1990's.

The 90’s were spent contracting and consulting and were probably the best time to be in computers as the PC matured and became a real force driven by client / server configurations and the maturing Windows Operating System.

Clients included Mobil, Laminex and the Royal Australian Navy.

A passing interest in Windows 2 with its flying chessboard logo and early copies of Windows 3 left John with a firm liking for the DOS operating system and it wasn’t until Visual Basic 3 and what was then Gupta SQL/Windows, (now Team Developer from Unify), persuaded him that there might be something to this Windows thing after all.

In 1996 Xansoft acquired software (LoanWriter) that produced letters of offer under the Australian Uniform Credit Code.  Responding to client requests for changes needed for marketing campaigns, LoanWriter was taken through 36 releases over the next four years

Xansoft built its own web site in 1999. It had six pages, all HTML 3.2 with Perl scripts for the e-commerce system. We built and sold a Visual Basic IDE add-on that counted lines of code. Unfortunately Microsoft moved a lot faster than Xansoft did and Visual Studio made the software obsolete. The logo and some bullet icons were the only graphics on the website and there were no special effects, database or much else. Sales were recorded in text files and the system sent us an e-mail when a sale happened.

Today it’s about open source software for the web. Xansoft now develops mostly in PHP against MySQL databases with JavaScript (jQuery and MooTools) for the front end.