South African electronic surveillance, security and image processing stalwart for the past 18 years, Thales Advanced Engineering, has adopted a new business strategy and direction and changed its name to Protoclea, trading as Protoclea Advanced Image Engineering. Managing director Dr Bennie Coetzer said there were two primary reasons for this: "Firstly, the company has over the past five years been confused with another 'Thales', a French company, which had a contract from the South African Government to construct combat suites for four corvettes being built in Germany. We formed and registered Thales Advanced Engineering in South Africa in 1987 and our company also operates in the defence industry. The French company, which used to be known as Thomson-CSF, elected to change its name to Thales in December 2000. While we hold the rights to the name in South Africa, the French Court did not support our rights in France. In short, to put an end to the confusion of the two companies here in South Africa, we decided it would better suit our long term interests to change our name." The second reason says Coetzer, is that the company is re-positioning itself to re-focus as a developer, manufacturer and supplier of a select range of both local and imported products for advanced CCTV surveillance and security solutions as well as a number of highly specialised advanced image engineering applications.