APM managed a research consortium under the EU’s Esprit programme in the early 90’s that was broadly focused on distributed systems and related standardisation efforts (ISO RM-ODP). The work and team were really very good in my opinion and I was foruntate enough to work on the multimedia aspects of the project as well as the software product ANSAworks. You can download ANSAworks here; for 5MB you get a name server and RPC system written in C that with a bit of work could be updated to run on Linux rather than the 1990s vintage UNIX systems it was developed on. The reports are available courtesy of the Computer Conservation Society here. Andy Herbert was the project lead and along with Joe Sventek, Dave Otway and many others provided an excellent ‘first job’ environment. ANSAworks was most notably used for the NASA NASA Astropyhics Data System (ADS) in the early 1990s and for Olivetti Research Active Badge System.