Compagnie des Machines Bull SA says that sales and services revenues for Charme, its constraint-based programming tool, more than doubled in 1992, with international sales growing four times as fast as those in France. Charme’s sales and marketing manager, Valerie Lelong, attributes the product’s success abroad to the lack of any real competition. She is hopeful that a similar growth rate will be maintained over the coming year. Total revenues from Charme were $10m this year compared with $4.2m in 1991. While Ms Lelong said that the majority of sales last year – $2.8m – were were generated in France, in 1992, some 80% of turnover came from outside of the country, mainly the UK, Australia and Japan. Services accounted for $7.3m of the 1992 total; the rest came from hardware and software sales. Constraint-based programming technology was the result of work carried out by Bull, Siemens AG and ICL Plc at their jointly-owned research centre in Munich on the CHIP restrictive logic language. Bull developed the idea to create an artificial intelligence tool, capable of solving scheduling, timetabling, delivery, and manpower planning problems. It claims to have sold 500 licences since the product was released in 1989. More than 20 applications, developed using Charme, are said to be in operation. Another 10 are expected this year, Bull says. The majority of customers that have developed applications using Charme have recouped their investment between one and two years. Major customers include British supermarket chain Tesco Plc, France’s new national library, and the national railway systems in Holland, Australia and Malaysia.
