Copernique Ltd of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, British subsidiary of Paris, France-based Copernique SA which designs, manufactures and markets database management and communications systems, opened for business last month (CI No 1,352). The UK base will focus on marketing its Database Server series which has been designed specifically for corporate data management to act as a central server where personal computers and departmental systems are used to update and access data. Prospective clients will include large software houses using it as the basis of turnkey systems, and large corporates that have the technology to install the product. Initially the workforce will total about three, but the UK company hopes to increase this to about eight as business takes off. Maintenance will be contracted to third party companies. Copernique SA was formed in 1980 by technologists and engineers from the French computer company Groupe Bull, with venture capital from two French banks that still own a minority of the company. The company employs nearly 200 staff in France and is now 63%-owned by the founding directors, 27% by financial institutions, 5% by Groupe Bull and 5% by Framatome SA, a French electrical engineering company. The founders wanted to form a small company to develop technology that they realised could be eventually marketed as a product. This is often difficult in the research and development departments of large companies as much emphasis is placed on updating existing products. One of the first major developments was the Diram family of disk management systems, which provide disk management, data cacheing, system sharing of disks, and disk mirroring. This is the bread and butter business of Copernique and the products are still supported and will be developed further to enhance performance. The Diram line is marketed by Bull HN Information Systems in the UK, also by Nokia and Encore Computer Corp under their own trade names, often packaged with their own computer systems. For instance Bull uses the Diram in its DPS 6 and 6000 series. The revenue received from these sales has been used to develop the Data Base File Server which has been on sale in France for over a year.
Server in three parts
The Servers are built using Diram technology as a base. There are three parts to the specification, a Front-End Communications Processor and a Logical Data Management unit based on Motorola 68020 architecture, and a Physical Data Management unit which uses the Diram bit-slice control and cache processor. These parts are contained in three different architectures dependant on user numbers. It is supplied either as one physical multi-processor machine in a single low-boy cabinet, a single high-boy, or as three multi-processor machines as a double high-boy cabinet which can accomodate further extensions to front-end communications processors and physical data management contollers. Personal computers or departmental systems can be connected on many networks including X25, X21, TCP/IP, Ethernet and Token Ring and the server can accessed using SQL or Codasyl, from OS/2, MS-DOS, Unix, DEC VAX and some Bull DPS series. Prices range from UKP30,000 for the Server aimed at smaller companies, up to hundreds of thousands at the top end. The company’s turnover for 1989 reached approximately UKP15m and an estimated UKP600,000, 40% of the French company’s profit, was ploughed into research and development; 75% of total sales were from the French domestic market, with the rest from other European companies. With its UK base, Copernique president Francois Michel hopes for sales outside France to rise to 50% within five years. Users include Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Air France, the German Ministry of Finance, Credit Lyonnais, France Telecom and most French government departments and public utilities. One of Copernique’s first projects using Diram was with computer services company CAP-Sesa, for France Telecom’s Minitel on-line phone directory. The database is over 50,000m characters, with 5m terminals and 24m subscribers. Other contracts
include the French Railways wagon routing system, and the SITA airlines’ telecommunications network which has over 300 members. – Elvadia Tolputt
