The European Commission has handed out the last pile of cash for Esprit III and UK companies will get UKP50m, a sixth of the total funding. The Department of Trade & Industry is being characteristally coy about who gets what, but 120 UK firms and 40 academic bodies take a share of the pot. Some of the lucky recipients are Acorn Computers Plc, British Telecommunications Plc, GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd, ICI Plc, ICL Plc, Mari Group Ltd of Gateshead and Short Brothers, the Belfast aerospace company that just won a big engineering and body parts contract with Air Canada. The Esprit III programme is the largest yet and has a total budget of UKP1,070m. The Department of Trade & Industry said there are unlikely to be further calls within Esprit III, but the Commission will launch a further set of programmes in 1995. The low-profile Mari is no stranger to European development programmes and last year was key to setting up the European Information Technology Association. Mari has three Esprit projects on the go at the moment: Copicat, Citycard and Iders. Copicat is about developing a generic architecture for computer-based remote training systems and an agreement on the contractual relationships between suppliers of different electronic media. Tony Cunningham, managing director of Mari Computer Systems, said the aim is to unblock the market and unite the different players in the educational market, including the publishers, course writers, licensing agents and system suppliers. One of Mari’s partners in the project is Dutch publishing house Elsevier NV. Citycard is built around developing multimedia, multi-service applications for the public sector in rural areas. Iders stands for the cumbersome phrase Integrated complete visibility software development process for embedded real time systems. Mari suggests it as the solution to problems in the development of real-time software intensive systems such as late detection of defects during development, typically in the integration phase, and the lack of communication between departments in the same company.
