Nat Systems Inc, the French client-server application development environment supplier, has added features to the latest version of its product, now called Nat Star, that are of tremendous interest to at least one of its banking clients. Paris bank Credit Industriel et Commercial develops all of its branch applications with Nat Star, which was first installed under its former name NS/DK, in 1992. Olivier Thimon, Credit Industriel branch systems manager, says he is excited about three new capabilities in particular. The first is the ability to separate graphical user interfaces from descriptions of data and its handling. This is important. A tool that doesn’t give you separate components gives you an application with integrated interface code that is very expensive to maintain. This way, we can do more prototyping, he said. The second is an expanded reference library, covering everything you might possibly have to manage, such as object classes and libraries. And the other one is a process modeller, which separates out the chain of events needed to process the data, such as which window to present, and the chain of system events needed to execute a transaction. Thomin says Credit Industriel has never regretted choosing Nat Systems, even though there were not really any second-generation client-server development products on the market at that time. Nat Systems developed the subsequent NS/DK-2, he says, using input from Credit Industriel, a tradition that continues. New product versions are always done in collaboration with users, so we are always assured of seeing the changes made that we need, he said. Functionally, the product is very seductive. The only reason we would change systems would be if the company were in bad health, which is currently not the case, he said. Nat Star supports Windows, NT, Unix, OS/2, MVS/CICS mainframes, AIX and Compagnie des Machines Bull SA systems. John Burton, chief executive for Nat Systems in Virginia, says, It is one of the only systems that supports native MVS/CICS, so users can evolve their legacy applications to client-server applications. Burton says his competitors are, on the low end of the product spectrum: PowerSoft Corp and Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic, which he says is only a partial solution; and, on the enterprise level, some software engineering technology from Texas Instruments Inc, which Burton says is dated; Seer, from an IBM Corp-First Boston Corp joint venture; and Forte Systems Inc, which is 40% of the size of Nat Systems and has 100 contracts to our 400, 399 of which are of course in Europe, he said. Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Consulting Group, Newton, Massachusetts says, Venture capitalist groups will often ask me to look at these little gem companies, such as Nat Systems, which is big in banking (automatic teller machines) in Europe. I like their technology quite a lot and, with some strong marketing, they really have a shot at something.
