As reported briefly earlier this month (CI No 1,670) Project management software specialist Metier Management Systems Ltd, Hayes, Middlesex, is changing its name, adopting that of its new parent, Lucas Industries Plc, Solihull, West Midlands, which acquired the software house from Lockheed Corp in April of last year. Metier, and its 50 subsidiaries round the world, will go under the name of Lucas Management Systems from next month. Metier’s managing director, Chris Barfield, says new validation, testing and quality assurance features will be added to its flagship Artemis project management software over the next six months. In addition the company will be buying in computer-aided design and other software from third parties for use with Artemis and is negotiating distribution and bundling agreements. Lucas itself now uses Artemis, although the firm has no overall corporate information technology strategy. Although Unix remains a fairly small component of Metier’s overall business, environments now supporting Artemis include IBM Corp’s RS/6000 unser AIX, Hwlett-Packard Co’s HP 700 Snakes, Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations, Toshiba Corp Sparc systems, Digital Equipment Corp Ultrix machines and ICL Plc’s DRS6000 – on which it has recently won a Home Office contract. Unix databases supported include Ingres and Oracle. In addition, Metier has just signed a deal with Group Bull SA and signed up another, undisclosed German car manufacturer for Artemis – Volkswagen AG and Bayerische MotorenWerke AG are already users. The new Lucas Management Systems has also snapped up, on undisclosed terms, Irvine, California, and Philedelphia-based K&H Project Systems Inc – founded in 1974 and claimed to be the the oldest project management software company in the world – to provide local area networking and financial management expertise, which will be added to Artemis.
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