BURLINGTON, Mass. [May 4, 2004]—The Ada Resource Association announced today that its member, Praxis Critical Systems, a UK-based company specializing in systems and requirements engineering, safety assurance, and software development, has signed a lightweight alliance agreement to sell its highly successful SPARK product line in the USA.

Praxis has teamed up with Phoenix-based Pyrrhus Software, which has a proven track record in the development of safety-critical and realtime embedded systems.

Joyce L Tokar, president of Pyrrhus Software, is regarded as the leading Ada programming expert in the US, and has worked extensively with Praxis in the past. Pyrrhus Software is ideally placed to develop the presence of SPARK in the USA.

Praxis calls SPARK "the world's first truly high-integrity, concurrent programming language." It is an annotated, design-by-contract subset of Ada95 that includes the Ravenscar tasking profile and can be used at the most demanding integrity levels required by regulatory bodies and high-integrity software standards. To date, SPARK has been applied successfully in diverse applications including railway signaling, smartcard security and avionics systems in the Lockheed C130J and EuroFighter ‘Typhoon' projects.

The arrangement between the two companies will see Praxis pass sales leads directly to Pyrrhus Software who will continue the sales process and provide a US based contact who fully understands the US market and can also provide SPARK support and training. This agreement also opens SPARK to "US eyes only" projects that cannot be directly supported from the UK at present.

Commenting on the new agreement, Mel Jackson, managing director of Praxis Critical Systems, said: "This is a groundbreaking agreement that will allow Praxis to expand the use of SPARK in the US market. We are delighted to be working with Joyce Tokar and Pyrrhus Software and we're confident that our combined track record in providing software and safety critical solutions will lead to considerable success in the USA."

"Pyrrhus Software is seeing increasing demands for high-quality tools that offer reliable support for the development of realtime, embedded, safety-critical applications," said Dr. Tokar. "SPARK will give our customers a well-integrated toolset to enable the development of high-integrity software. We are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with Mel Jackson and the excellent team of engineers at Praxis Critical Systems to bring the SPARK tools into the US market."

For further information please contact:
Gary Squires/David Pippett, Creatrix PR, Tel: 01225 423400
e-mail: gary@creatrixpr.co.uk or david@creatrixpr.co.uk

The Ada Resource Association (http://www.adaresource.com) is an international trade group comprising the principal vendors of Ada-related technology. The ARA promotes and publicizes Ada technology usage (http://www.adaic.org), and it sponsors the ongoing development and maintenance of the Ada language standard and supporting infrastructure.