UK companies Realstream Ltd and Centaur Systems Ltd have teamed up to provide a system that marries text, fixed-format data and image management and, they hope, will garner sales by providing a much lower entry cost than large scale image or text retrieval systems from the major players in the market. The system, Origin, is built round a unified relational database management system developed by Cardiff-based Centaur and is due for formal launch in October. It includes support for optical disk storage, typically using a Unisys 5000 series Unix machine as a host. Key features are that documents fed in require no pre-indexing, and the cost – entry level systems come in at under UKP100,000, so that the scale of investment required to take on large text retrieval systems from the likes of Olivetti with the Filenet system, or image management systems from Kodak, is not initially necessary. Realstream and Centaur Systems have formed a jointly-owned company, Time Information Technology Ltd, of which Realstream holds 51%, to market the system. Origin has so far been targeted largely at financial customers and the company hopes to have a couple signed up by October. Ultimately, Origin may be licensed to other resellers. Dorchester, Dorset-based Realstream provided Centaur with the funding needed to bring the product to market: it began life two years ago as a micro distributor and is now a Unisys reseller and distributor, doing some UKP1.5m in revenues in its second year. Other Unix suppliers that have tackled the market for combined text and image storage systems include Plexus Computers, which uses a modified Informix.
