British Telecommunications Plc has launched a distributed electronic database based on X500 architecture called Cohort 500 which has taken three years and more than UKP2m to develop: an electronic directory for use within organisations enabling them to keep up-to-date information on each employee, ranging from his or her fax number to room number, as well as a job summary and the name of his or her boss and secretary, it Cohort 500 runs on Unix offerings from Hewlett-Packard, DEC and Sun Microsystems and the underlying technology is the Oracle relational database management system; it is sold as a package from British Telecom and will cost between UKP20,000 and UKP200,000.
