In a packed presentation yesterday to its customers and partners of its corporate and technical strategies, French client-server tools developer Nat Systemes SA says it expects its technical advantages to reproduce abroad the same success it has seen in the last couple of years. The company saw its 1993 revenue double from 1992, to the equivalent of $10.5m, and looks for $17m to $18m this year. In 1994-95, the challenge for us is to succeed in conquering the international market. We aim to have 50% of our revenues from outside France by the end of 1995, said managing director Jean-Francois Gallouin – up from just $1.5m last year. The company opened in Spain at the end of 1992, the US – fuelled by a $2m a year contract from Equitable Life and Benelux last January, Italy in June and here in the UK in September. In France, it counts France Telecom among its users Nat Systemes’ NS-DK was used to develop a billing system for 23m people with 70 developers over two years. Both in Europe and overseas, Nat Systemes will continue to rely on service companies and manufacturers to distribute its products, itself concentrating on further tool development, although service revenue should increase in 1994 to 19% of the total from 15%, because NS-DK/2 demands accompaniment, Gallouin said. If the company manages to reproduce its strategy in the US, it reckons it could do between $10m and $12m there in 1995. Nat Systemes’ subcontracting business with Microsoft Corp, which in 1993 accounted for 5% of revenues, should remain at around 5% of revenues, Gallouin said. The company is step by step building a client-server development environment with its NS-Dict/2 referential dictionary at the core. The dictionary has interfaces to all of Nat Systemes configuration management tools and to products from its partners and competitors, including Softlab GmbH’s Maestro and Bachman Informations Systems Products. The NS-DK/3 design tool should be ready in June or July. The company reckons that its strengths are its C-code generation and its use of a non-proprietary programming language. There are not many companies that generate C. PowerSoft will have it at the end of the year, but we have a few months edge. Its NCL language is a mixture of Cobol, Pascal and C.
