Bournemouth-based software engineering tools specialist Systematica Ltd has made over 20% of its staff redundant as part of a plan to become a sales- and marketing-driven operation instead of a tecchie company. Of its 70 employees, 15, primarily technical, are to depart. The company says that the cuts are being made to fund expansion of marketing activities, predominantly in the US: 70% of the company’s business is outside the UK. The restructuring follows last April’s departure of the then marketing director, Mike Fish, and the appointment of the head of IBM UK research labs, Sir John Fairclough, as non-executive chairman (CI No 1,506): IBM took a 20% stake in the company for an undisclosed sum in September 1990, and the company is an AD/Cycle Business Partner. The company also announced at that time that it had had to move staff from its Digital Equipment Corp division to a more neutral-sounding multi vendor systems arm, token of the importance of the IBM link, though Systematica refuses to disclose how much business is non-IBM. Systematica’s flagship product, the Virtual Software Factory, is a CASE tool for building other CASE tools, and is the basis for IBM’s Business System Development Tool, BSDT, CASE offering. Systematica’s founder chairman and sales director Andrew Wells says the company remains committed to its relationship with DEC, despite the apparent IBM bias of the company. Wells refused to disclose any current financial details, saying only that its revenues were up on last year the last year it released any breakdown was 1990, when it recorded UKP5m turnover – but says selling $17m worth of software with only five salesman wasn’t bad going, presumably referring to some aggregation of Virtual Software Factory business since its inception in 1986. At the time of the departure of Fish, Wells predicted the company would return a small loss because of the investment it had needed to put into an OS/2 version of the Software Factory, but he now refuses to elaborate on any financial questions. This kind of wariness when dealing with the outside world has come to be a Systematica trademark, quite unlike the higher profile enjoyed by its main rival, Macclesfield, Cheshire-based Ipsys Ltd, which claims to have beaten Systematica to a number of contracts – but they would say that, wouldn’t they. What is certain is that Systematica has abandoned at least one of the markets in which it competed with Ipsys, that of the Hood object-oriented methodology developed by the European Space Agency; the marketing rights to its Virtual Software Factory-Hood software has been handed over to a Danish company, CRI A/S of Copenhagen. A number of software vendors including Information Builders Inc, Cognos Inc, and Informix Software Inc have formed relationships with Systematica in connection with the Virtual Software Factory and its support for the UK Government-sponsored Structured Systems Analysis and Design, SSADM, methodology.

OS/2 front end

Canada’s Cognos Inc, partners with Systematica for the last three years, says that it doesn’t expect the changes at Systematica will affect the planned release of an OS/2 front end analysis and design tool developed using the Systematica tool which will support its proprietary Power Design method. Unix relational database supplier Informix, whose UK headquarters is in Ashford, Middlesex, revealed that while it had sold some copies of a product developed with Virtual Software Fcatory that supported SSADM version 3 – effectively superseded two years ago by version 4 – work on an announced upgrade using VSF was on hold while it reveiwed its whole CASE tool strategy. VSF is being used by Information Builders to build a development tool for applications written in its Focus proprietary language, and has been for at least two years: a product is likely mid-year, according to a spokesman. When asked if they didn’t think was really a rather long time, the reply was, But it’s a very complicated business: indeed, and so is turning into a marketing-led company when your background is as a purely

technically-driven one. – Gary Flood