A management buy-out at the artificial intelligence products division of SD-Scicon Plc has resulted in the formation of a new company, Integral Solutions Ltd, due to be launched today. Based in Basingstoke, Hampshire, the company takes over the rights and support for SD-Scicon’s widely used Poplog artificial intelligence development environment, and says it aims to cash in on the boom in sales of powerful desktop workstations. Poplog, originally developed at Sussex University and exclusively licensed to SD-Scicon, has around 350 commercial, government and academic users and has an existing portfolio of software products, according to Integral’s managing director, Dr Alan Montgomery: we are offering a toolset that enables users to integrate advanced software into real applications on conventional, widely available hardware, he said. Poplog allows software development to be carried out in any mixture of Prolog, Common Lisp and Pop-11, and runs on Sun Microsystems workstations and DEC VAXstations, with more announcements to come. Integral will also be distributing a Poplog version of Keris, an object oriented knowledge engineering tool kit developed by GEC Marconi Research Ltd, and says it plans a steady roll-out of new applications over the next two years. The company hopes to sell to the aerospace and defence, engineering and process industries, as well as to public utilities and the educational sector. SD-Scicon says that while it has spun off its artificial intelligence products business, it will continue to offer consultancy in it.
