EA Systems Inc, the Alameda, California company organised to acquire Digital Equipment Corp’s PASCE Plant Applications & Systems for Concurrent Engineering database-driven plant design and management development system (CI No 2,546), has now acquired Advanced Systems Consultants Ltd of Cambridge, here in the UK. With the acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, EA Systems gets ownership and control of Phoenix, a two-dimensional schematics modelling package used in the PASCE product suite. The Cambridge company will become the base for EA Systems’ activities in the European market, and it reckons the combined companies can offer two of the world’s best application suites for plant engineering and data management. All of Advanced’s products use the same database manager and development tools as the PlantView three-dimensional plant modelling package marketed as part of the PASCE suite. Phoenix is a database-driven computer-aided engineering system for creating and managing the schematic diagrams and associated data used in the design and operation of process and power plants. It runs primarily under Unix where PASCE is now optimised for operation in OpenVMS and Windows NT environments, so the acquisition means the companies will be able to offer all modules of PASCE for any of the three environments.
