Wikipedia
Compsoft plc is a software development house located in the market town of Alton, Hampshire.
It formed subsequent to founder Nick Horgan writing a database system in BASIC while at university, which in 1985 was released commercially. Horgan married Heather Kearsay with Kearsay taking control of marketing the Database product with considerable success.
Compsoft grew rapidly, floating its shares on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM). This resulted in a takeover bid from investor Bill Eastwood, who wanted to merge the flourishing Compsoft with software houses Format Ltd and Sagesoft Plc. This action saw Compsoft shares being suspended.
The flagship product of this era was Delta, an MS-DOS relational database development tool that was sold into the 1990s. Version 4.3 was released in 1988. To compete with the technology changes introduced by Microsoft and its Windows operating system, Compsoft developed Equinox, a Windows-compatible rapid application development tool.
Equinox, as a rapid application development tool used by in-house teams and development specialists alike, saw significant take-up. According to a historic Compsoft webpage viewed via the Internet Archive, users of Equinox included many well known organisations within the service, technology, public, financial and retail sectors.
The investment into research and development of Equinox brought about a new project, named Mirago, that trialled indexing technologies. This project extended into indexing and storing data across the Internet, culminating in the creation of the UK-focused search engine in 2000. Mirago plc has become a leading provider of Internet advertising technologies, its success recognised with the company being listed in The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 for two consecutive years (2005 and 2006).
While supporting and continuing its investment in Equinox, Compsoft expanded its technology focus to include Microsoft.NET, Java and mobile development platforms including iOS and Android. Its expertise in custom development was recognised with accreditation as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
Compsoft entered the rapidly growing mobile application development space at an early stage and much of the company's growth from 2010 has been through its success in this sector. In November 2012, Compsoft were awarded 'Most Effective Tablet Application' at the Mobile Marketing Awards for its service iPresent.
The iPresent project was established to create a presentation tool, to provide a coordinated approach to content distribution within distributed global multilingual corporations. At the beginning of 2013, the project and associated infrastructure was demerged from Compsoft as iPresent Ltd, a separate company.