Systems engineering house Ingenia SA has won two major contracts with pension fund management companies in Paris and Marseilles to re-engineer their information systems from the bottom up into a client-server architecture, says Claude Amenc, managing director. The new Smalltalk-based applications will feature data management that uses relational, workflow and groupware technologies, says Amenc, whose company specialises in artificial intelligence, object-oriented programming and other advanced computing techniques. The new systems are scheduled to be operational in Marseilles and Paris next month and in January 1996, respectively, he said. Ingenia, which uses tools from compatriot Ilog SA, the software engineering tool maker, currently operates only in France. But, says Amenc, we are inspired to enter the North American market for constraints-based programming because they are somewhat reticent with that technology, so nobody is really doing it. Established in 1989, Ingenia has seen its revenues and profit triple since since 1991. In 1993, the company reported revenues of some $4.1m and profit of $170,850, compared with sales of $1.42m and profit of $56,000. Amenc believes the company’s secret lies in being run by about 12 men who could each easily be running their own company: people like Michel Lai, who wrote the HOOD object-oriented method. Every so often, it makes it hard to manage them! he quipped. Those managers hold 64% of Ingenia’s capital, he added. Ingenia has also developed an automated program to read the uncoded part of a Swift message and route it. All banks have the same problem in routing Swift messages, he said. Banks that have either installed the Ingenia product or are in the process of getting ready to do so include Credit Commerciale de France, Credit Lyonnais and Banque Indosuez.
