Keeping technologies for its home markets is not the key to success, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA finally seems to have realised, and by the end of June it will have created a software solutions division under the charge of Axel Leblois, president and chief executive of Bull HN Information Systems Inc in the US. The venture will be headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts, and will begin marketing unbundled versions of existing software technologies and developing new offerings for worldwide markets. Included will be Bull’s vaunted Distributed Computing Model technologies, Integrated Systems Management and other existing code, plus a slew of new products slated for the coming weeks and months. They include new mainframe-to-Unix communications software due in a couple of weeks, other enterprise communications and data warehousing software due at DB/Expo in May, and a new groupware product that will roll out at the same time as the new division. Alain Couder, president of Bull’s Open Systems and Software operation, is apparently putting the new division together, tapping marketing and development staff across various US and European locations. Leblois will report directly to Bull chief executive Jean-Marie Descarpentries. Bull asserts that the new division will go ahead on May 1, whatever the outcome of its on-going and troubled privatisation process.
