Sunnyvale, California-based Atherton Technology Inc’s integrated project support environment is to be marketed in Europe by GEC-Marconi Software Systems, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. Atherton’s Software Backplane – a repository and services for linking computer-aided software engineering – CASE – tools, data and methodologies – and SoftBoard, a series of software development applications, run on IBM’s RS/6000, Sun Microsystems’ Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparc systems and DEC’s VMS and Ultrix systems. GEC-Marconi Software’s director Keith Wilman says the company has been working with Atherton’s project environment since March of this year – it already sells IBM-based and other software engineering offerings in the UK. Although Atherton’s president Arthur Goldberg believes that integration and project management tools will become increasingly important across the board as demand for, and investment in software development continues to outstrip resources available to do the job, he is looking in particular to the real-time software engineering market where recent studies by London-based analyst Ovum Ltd suggest that integration efforts will grow to become the largest single component of the overall real-time software engineering tools marketplace. Ovum estimates that this market will be worth $204m in the UK by 1995 – up from only around $63m now, and $1,663m in the US, from $506m this year. Atherton’s technology uses object-oriented programming techniques and has an X Window-based graphical user interface.