Atherton Technology Inc, based in Sunnyvale, California is valiantly battling on with the marketing of its Software BackPlane CASE framework software despite the fact that Hewlett-Packard Co’s rival SoftBench product is rapidly becoming a de facto standard within the Unix community. Nevertheless, Atherton has announced that Etnoteam SpA of Milan will distribute the software in Italy and that Verilog SA of Toulouse has become Atherton’s distributor in France, where Thomson-CSF SA is a major shareholder in Atherton.