The Thomson Ventures subsidiary of Thomson-CSF SA has taken a majority stake in Sunnyvale, California developer of integrated software engineering tools, Atherton Technology Inc, but financial details were not given. The company will use the investment to expand the marketing of its products in the US as well as in Europe and Japan, working in co-ordination with Thomson’s Syseca SA software house in France, which also develops software engineering framework products. Syseca has an implementation of PCTE and plans to market PCTE-based products. Atherton designed ATIS, which it says has been adopted as a repository standard by Digital Equipment Corp and IBM Corp, and it markets a family of Software BackPlane products based on this standard. The company, founded in 1986, has also had venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, The Mayfield Fund, Menlo Ventures and Morgan Stanley.
