Sherpa Corp of Bracknell, Berkshire has recently been active in recruiting large Unix-based system manufacturers to market its eponymous enterprise-wide product information management system. Following earlier joint marketing deals with Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, $6m-a-year Sherpa in February signed with DEC to implement its system on the VAX, DECstation and Ultrix environments, and with Unisys’ Europe Africa Division shortly afterwards, to promote the product information system alongside Unisys’ InfoImage Engineering Document Management System on the company’s Solbourne-made S2000 Unix Sparc 4-compliant system. And Sherpa’s latest coup is becoming an authorised software vendor for IBM, marketing the Sherpa package on the RS/6000. First shipments of Sherpa for the IBM workstation are scheduled for the third quarter. A product document image system, explains Sherpa’s John Moore, is a set of applications that can be tailored by the user to manage any information that describes a manufacturer’s product, in the form of computer-based files and attributions about the files which inform the manufacturer for example where a drawing is kept, or when test results were last updated. Sherpa Corp, which has a strong distributor in Cap Gemini Sogeti in Italy, and is represented in the UK, France, Australia, the US, shortly to set up in Germany – claims to have 50% of the market for product information management systems and says that no other software supplier has come up with a product as powerful and integrated as Sherpa, but the company reckons that computer-aided design tool vendors will soon start to encroach on Sherpa’s market share with value-added offerings and, at the mainframe level, IBM’s Product Manager concept could pose a threat. Sherpa is pitching at aerospace and defence businesses, telecommunications and computer suppliers, and its 80 worldwide customers include Philips NV, GEC Plessey Communications, Thorn EMI, NCR in Scotland, Siemens Defence in the UK and Boeing Electronics.
