The Rt Hon Malcolm Rifkind, MP, Secretary of State for Scotland was in Glasgow on Monday to open British Telecommunications Plc’s new Systems and Software Engineering Centre (CI No 954). The opening represents a UKP5m investment by British Telecom over two years and is expected to result in jobs for more than 100 people. The centre is part of the Systems and Software Development Division of Research and Technology which carries out work ranging from modular enhancements to existing operational systems to complete systems design and development. There are three centres in the division: the first based in London was opened in the late 1960s, Belfast followed in 1981 and finally Glasgow this week. British Telecom’s chairman Iain Vallance said the most important factor in choosing Glasgow was the availability of skilled graduates from Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. He explained that although it has 2,900 people at its major research centre, the British Telecom Research Lab oratories at Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, the company was having difficulties attracting graduates there. The Glasgow Centre has been operational since March and is currently working on five projects: an information retrieval system running on the DEC VAX supporting a network of workstations to manage large documentation sets containig text and graphics; a portable terminal with which Telecom faultsmen will communicate with the Repair Service Control; a centralised intelligence for the telephone network; a communications coprocessor for use in Telecom’s Switched Star cable television systems; a system to aid the automatic documentation of systems produced using the Oracle relational database; and a convertor to allow different controllers to be used together in one cable television network.
