Although it’s a little too early to attribute commercial success to Paris-based O2 SA, since the fledgling company’s object-oriented database development technology only began shipping last June, it has apparently been judged to have commercial potential by about 35 customers in France. They include French utility Electricite et Gaz de France, Aerospatiale and the Commissariat de Energie Atomique. At the Institut Geographique Nationale, for instance, Benoit David, database administrator for the institute’s research laboratory, is using O2 to devevlop a prototype system for modelling and storing complex geographical data for map making. The system should be ready by the end of the year. David says O2’s system, even though it still lacks indexing and clustering functions, enables him to model graphical and grid information easily, where it has always been poorly represented by relational databases. The institute, he notes, has tried using two different relational databases, Oracle and Empress, in map-making applications, but with little success. The originality of O2 is oriented towards large volume databases, David says. There are a lot more products oriented just for smaller volumes, he notes, adding that such products are not useful for the kind of applications needed by the institute. As yet, some of the modules, such as the O2Tools graphical programming environment, have just gone into the beta test version, scheduled for April, and functions are still being added to others. The indexing and clustering needed at the geographic institute, for example, is expected in March. The main modules – O2ENgine, O2C, a proprietary object language, O2Look Toolkit, and O2SQL – meanwhile are in production, says chief executive Francois Bancilhon. Until O2’s technology has been proven in commercial applications, says Judith Jeffcoate, associate consultant at Ovum Ltd, London, the biggest advantage O2 offers over the other object-oriented database vendors in Europe and the US is philosophical. They are slightly purer in terms of object oriented technology. The purist view, of course, says that they stand more closely by the object manifesto, she explains. The five years of research behind O2’s technology was initiated in 1986 by INRIA, France’s national institute for research in informatics and automation, when it set up the Altair consortium, comprising itself, Siemens-Nixdorf, Bull, the University of Paris XI and CNRS, the National Centre for Scientific Research. The goal of the consortium was to design and implement a next-generation database management system. After investing 130 man-hours of development effort, the final O2 system was completed and tested internally in September 1990 and went into beta test three months later. The company was formed in mid-1991 with Bancilhon leading a number of former members of the consortium. Directly addressing the same needs of customers of other object database vendors in the US is high on O2’s priority list. It has already set up an office in Boston, Massachusetts, to serve as a centre for its preliminary activities – talking to industrial partners and beta site set-ups. Further development of its US venture, including direct sales, is the goal of a second round of venture capital financing, which we hear is due to arrive in March. Laurent Hyafil, O2’s director of internal development, reckons the company should have a more complete structure set up in the US by summer. The company already has $3m in financing.
