I was working at Parallax Solutions Ltd. when the company was taken over by the UK division of Keane Inc., a large American software company.
At Parallax I had been working on a large client/server project for BMW in Germany which integrated data from the central manufacturing systems with data from local dealers across Europe into a Marketing database. The client side software was developed using Centura Team Developer (Gupta SQL Windows) which was linked to an Oracle database. I worked on both the client side code and server side database code. I was promoted to team leader during the final stages of the project development, and continued managing a small team handling change requests after the system was in production.
When the BMW project finally wound up I joined an outsourcing team working at Transco in Solihull developing a workflow system for handling queries on the company's metering database. I worked initially developing Oracle code, then worked on client side GUI in Visual Basic, and a web interface using HTML, XML and ASP.
After the Transco project finished there was no more work available. During my time at Transco, Keane had already made about half the staff redundant, and I was eventually let go too, although I wasn't concerned as I knew I had a job waiting for me at Triton Technology.
