Object-oriented design and analysis tools vendor Cayenne Software Ltd has acquired tiny MultiQuest Corp of Schaumburg, Illinois in exchange for 50,000 shares – valuing the company at around $200,000 – as its entry into the low-cost design tool market. Despite the low value, the company insists that the move is a strategic one. MultiQuest’s S-CASE application, which costs $750 and which is currently in use at 170 companies around the world, is to be re-named PepperSeed. Cayenne, the result of last year’s merger between Bachman Information Systems Inc and Cadre Technologies Inc, reckons its Object Team object modeling and coding tool has the high-end of the market covered, where its users are already sold on the ideas of analysis and design and very much into methodologies. It wants PepperSeed for those potential customers still more focused on the coding, who are looking for an entry-level package. In the past, most of that business has gone to Cayenne’s rivals such as Select Software Tools Inc, Rational Software Corp and Platinum Technology Inc. The tool is aimed at getting developers started with object design methods, and Cayenne is setting up a migration path for them to upgrade to ObjectTeam at a later date. It is already working on data interchange between the two tools, work that should be finished within a month, and promises further integration, including access to its common repository, in the future. PepperSeed runs on Windows 95, NT, and the Apple Macintosh. Cayenne, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, will retain MultiQuest’s four staff members, including the product’s chief architect, Naresh Bhatia.
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