Genio SA, a French data management start-up born out of SGS Thomson SA, has launched version 2.0 of its eponymous data capture and exchange software, set up shop in the UK and is about to hit the US running. The company was formed three years ago by a group of Thomson engineers that developed a product to capture data from a wide variety of systems including relational databases and mainframe file systems and populate either a relational or multidimensional database. The product was initially developed for Thomson’s in-house use, because Thomson could not find a suitable product on the market to take data from hetrogeneous systems which was simple enough to manage, maintain and use. The Paris start-up has been known as Leonard’s Logic SA – when pronounced in French it suggests Leonardo da Vinci but doesn’t have quite the same ring in English, so the UK subsidiary, set up in November by former Arbor Software Corp executive Chris Hill, will be called Genio, as will the US business. Genio has native links to DB/2 databases on the mainframe and AS/400, and where it has no native links uses standard ODBC open database connectivity. Since its launch last year, the product has been taken up by 30 of France’s top 500 companies, including France Telekom and the French operation of Smith Kline Beecham Plc. Hill says its target audience is IT directors in large companies who are feeling the pain of managing large amounts of data transferring around the organization. Obvious applications are in populating datawarehouses, which the company says is likely to provide its entry into an organization, but it is also being used for Year 2000 work and any application where data needs to be transferred between systems. Hill says competitive products are either no where near as functionally rich as Genio, or if they are, they are massively complicated and generate a load of Cobol code which then takes a lot of maintaining. The company was funded initially by French venture capital, and last year got an undisclosed injection of venture capital from the US. Its target is to float on Nasdaq in 2000. The company is currently recruiting sales and technical people in the US, and is looking for a chief executive. Since its UK launch in November, Genio has four as yet unnamed UK sites up and running, and Hill says he is talking to a number of prospects. Genio also has a Canadian office, which has recently won Northern Telecom Ltd as its first customer. It is also talking to distributors across Europe. The product breaks down into various components. There is an engine for data transformation, and companies can buy one or more of these, according to the amount of data. There are data links to each host database, and an object-based Designer point and click interface, which enables users to enter business logic, and the scheduler. Systems currently range from around ú37,000 to ú200,000 depending on number of engines, data links and designer interfaces required
