US engineering data management company Sherpa Corp has established its European headquarters at Bracknell in Berkshire. The privately-held company was founded in 1980, backed by several US venture capital firms, and the major European investor is Londonbased Abingworth Ltd. According to Dataquest, the engineering data management market is set to grow from UKP13m in 1986 to UKP281m by 1990. Sherpa plans to address this with its engineering tool DMS, the Design Management System. John Moore, director of European Operations, believes that DMS is unique in its field, largely because of its heterogenous nature. It can be networked over IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, DEC and Apollo Computer workstations, running under Unix and VMS. Moore also claims that unlike other systems, DMS not only addresses the needs of single departments, but integrates data from the design process through to the manufacturing stage. This real-time management enables design teams to have current status information about their project, thus preventing duplication and incompatible alterations. It also facilitates easier and morecost effective upgrades and maintenance. In the US, Sherpa numbers Rockwell International, Ford Aerospace and Hughes Radar in its client list. It claims that they have benefitted enormously, both in design time and money, from the software. The company offers a Quickstart service which allows customers to install DMS on a small-scale, to then evaluate it and buy user licences as required. Quickstart costs around UKP40,000, and would normally take a minimum of two months to be up and running. Sherpa is aiming DMS at the computer, electronics, telecommunications and aerospace industries, and has sold licences to NCR in Scotland, and Philips in the Netherlands.
