Guildford, Surrey-based Signal Computing Ltd is moving into the graphical user interface environment thanks to a marketing agreement it has signed with French system house ILOG SA. Signal is a bespoke software house operating in the technical market with its roots in the defence industry, building applications in areas such as signal processing. Signal is part of the Basys group of companies that specialise in broadcasting systems. It was looking for a tool to use internally to build graphical user interfaces and discovered ILOG’s product set, which was not available in the UK. Signal was so impressed by the company that it decided to take on exclusive distribution rights for the product. ILOG is based in Paris and currently has 70 employees, net profits of $935,000 on a turnover of $7.5m, and has sold 3,200 licences worldwide for the tools. ILOG is in charge of developing the product and leaves independent software vendors to handle most sales and to tailor end-user products. The product set of modular tools is written in Le-Lisp and a package including the Aida graphic library designed to simplify interface programming and the accompanying Masai development environment costs UKP15,500. Signal is also marketing ILOG’s Asquell product, designed to interface applications to any SQL database, although Empress, Informix, Ingres, Oracle, Rdb, Sabrina, Sybase and Unify are fully supported. The company claims that Asquell applications are fully portable, so that, for example, an application developed on a Sun-3 workstation using Oracle can also run on a DECstation 3100 with Ingres. ILOG also claims that Asquell applications can communicate simultaneously with several databases, even when these belong to different database management systems. Sold with Le-Lisp, Asquell costs UKP5,000. Aida and Masai between them require about 8Mb of memory, while Asquell needs only 200Kb. The products run on most mid-range Unix environments, as well as Apple Mac IIs. The graphical interface products can generate Motif or Open/Look and interface to C or Fortran programs.
