Imperial Software Technology Ltd has been revealing its future plans, having recently secured a UKP1.25m package of equity and loan funding from a consortium of backers, (CI No 1,110) – as well as unveiling a new version of its Integrated Product Support Environment software development package, Istar 3.3. Chairman Art Rubino says the overdraft has enabled the company to offset losses, continue its product development and will allow the acquisition of some small UK companies in the Unix and computer aided software engineering markets. Founded in 1982 and based in South West London, Imperial now has 50 employees, and saw revenue of UKP2m in the last financial year, half accounted for by product sales, the other half from its consultancy operations. Rubino says the objectives are to achieve profitability by 1990 and to become a UKP10m outfit by 1992, via an organic growth rate of 40% a year, plus acquisitions and subsidiary development in the US, West Germany and France. Introducing the new version of Istar, Rubino commented as opposed to large scale software projects around the world that are a pound short and a day late, ours is on time and to budget, – a swipe at the long overdue product releases from Lotus Development Corp and Ashton-Tate Corp. Istar Version 3.3 is basically an operating system for software tools, combining a database, the Teamwork package, documentation and system management and control functions – as well as interfacing to a variety of other software engineering tools. It presents a common look and feel to the user, and is written in 400,000 lines of C code. It runs under Unix on Sun workstations and VMS on DEC VAXstations. Prices start at $5,000 for each user or ‘seat’ required on the system – often running into thousands for this type of application. One copy has already been delivered to Motorola Inc in the US for its communications operations, others are due to go to GEC Software and Plessey. In future Apollo Aegis, IBM AIX and MS-DOS versions are to be developed as well as a version supporting X-Window System, AT&T’s Open Look and the Open Software Foundation’s planned Motif user interface.
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