The foreseeable future is a very short time-frame in the Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG lexicon: the company said only in September, when it raised its stake in Pyramid Technology Corp to 17.6%, that it didn’t see the new deal leading to it acquiring Pyramid in the foreseeable future – yet yesterday, less than four months later, it announced that it was holding talks with Pyramid that were likely to lead to a bid of $15 a share for the Mountain View, California parallel Unix server manufacturer. Such a bid would cost value the company at $234m, and cost Nixdorf $193m for the shares it does not already hold – it paid only $10 a share for the last tranche, which took it up from about 5% previously. The mooted offer values Pyramid at about one year’s sales – the company lost $22.4m on sales of $218.5m – down about 6% on the previous year – for the year to end-September. Siemens Nixdorf already takes Pyramid machines OEM and wants the new Meshines to compete with IBM Corp’s SP2 parallel m achines, and has licensed Pyramid’s parallel extensions to Unix. Pyramid’s other OEM customers are Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and AT&T Corp, both in a small way, and ICL Plc, which has also licensed some of its parallel technology for Goldrush.
