Database developer Raima Corp, of Bellevue, Washington, is talking to its UK distributor, Systemstar Ltd of Hertford, with the intention of setting up a direct presence in the UK market. Raima UK is likely to be jointly owned by the two companies, and is said by Systemstar’s David Turley to be the inevitable consequence of our selling the product for the last five years. While Raima’s database – now called the Raima Data Manager, but previously known as Db_Vista – is one of the least widely publicised of personal computer and Unix databases, it has carved out a niche for itself among C programmers. It has a network architecture for high-performance and referential integrity, but also enables purely relational systems to be built where required. There is also the Raima Object Manager set of class libraries. Raima’s appeal is to technical users writing complex applications rather than the packaged market, and Unix sales now account for 20% or so of UK business. Systemstar ties in the product in with Liant Software Corp’s C-Scape screen interface package, originally developed by the Oakland Group, a company acquired by Liant in May last year. Systemstar already has a full-time employee from Raima working in the UK, but has not yet worked out the details of its joint venture: a separate Systemstar operation could well continue to handle the distributor’s other product lines, which include a competing product, the KnowledgeMan extended network database from Micro Data Base Systems Inc of Lafayette, Indiana.
