Texas Instruments’ computer-aided software engineering tool Information Engineering Facility has been launched in the UK by Information Engineering Products Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of James Martin Associates, joint developer of the Facility. The package, which comprises five IBM Personal AT or compatible toolsets and a mainframe encyclopedia for IBM mainframes running CICS and DB2, or any other SQL-based database management system, is available now, with a code generation tool to be released in Europe in September. Texas Instruments has appointed James Martin as sole distributor outside the US – Information Engineering Facility has been beta tested at Ford and Volvo in Europe and at Amoco, the US Army and Navy and the First Boston Corp in the States. The code generator will produce automatically debugged VS Cobol II and will be released in the US as an addition to Texas’ Early Support Programme for the Facility, launched last November. Information Engineering Products Ltd, with 20 employees, aims to make 10 to 15 sales of the Facility this year and the company anticipates further releases of the product, geared to other relational databases. The entry-level configuration, with a minimum of five toolsets, is UKP87,000; the code generator, when it is released, will cost between UKP100,000 and UKP200,000. Additional toolsets will be available at around UKP10,000.
