Computer Associates International Inc has chosen investment banker Updata Group Inc to solicit and evaluate bids to license those four VSE systems management products owned by Legent Corp: the choice of Updata was also approved by the US Justice Department: the products at issue are EPIC/VSE, VSE tape and disk management; – FAQS/PCS, VSE automated job scheduling; Alert/VSE and Alert/CICS, VSE security; and FAQS/ASO for VSE, VSE automated operations; existing users of the products will have the option to elect whether to continue to receive maintenance and support from Computer Associates or to switch to whoever the new provider may be; bidding will close on August 23.
Siemens AG said it had taken a 40% stake in Thai telecommunications installation and services company Modern Engineering & Consultants Co Ltd; the terms were not disclosed.
The top executives of Computer Associates International Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc will share a platform in New York this evening London time: they are not giving any hints on subject matter, but five’ll get you 10 it’s Unicenter.
Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is dumping the whole of its Latin American business into a joint venture with its Brazilian partner Algar Group Ltda: the agreement sets up a new corporate entity called Algar Bull Computer & Communication Ltda to regroup and manage the companies of both groups operating on the information technology market in Latin America; the company will focus on information technology products and systems integration, and will have revenues in 1995 of $200m, the communique said.
Newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder Inc has closed the research lab it established to explore electronic publishing alternatives: the Information Design Laboratory, which opened in Boulder, Colorado three years ago, was developing a notebook computer for receiving and displaying electronic newspapers.
LSI Logic Corp was known to have chosen Oregon over Texas for its first 8 wafer fabrication plant, but it is only now that it has formally announced Gresham as the location within Oregon for the plant: groundbreaking will begin this week and the fab should begin producing semiconductors with 0.35-micron circuit linewidths in early 1997; the firs phase is expected to cost the firm between $600m and $800m.
Nice work if you can get it – when Bob Jones left the then Dowty Information Systems to set up Sonix Ltd, Dowty released him from his contract in return for 10% of Sonix for a nominal sum of ú600 – and now that Sonix has been sold to 3Com Corp, the windfall comes to TI Group Plc, which bought Dowty in 1992 – and it’s worth a cool ú4.5m.
The UK Department of Trade & Industry has added Finland and New Zealand to the countries to which international simple resale telephone service is permitted: the existing four countries are the US, Australia, Canada and Sweden, the only markets hitherto deemed to be open.
British Telecommunications Plc’s Australian unit has started legal proceedings against the New South Wales government and state telecommunications operator Telstra Corp over their alleged breach of its contract valued at around ú350m.
Chipcom Corp and its directors have been sued in a purported class action lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court by Lucille Nappo, who claims to be a Chipcom shareholder, and alleges that Chipcom’s board violated its fiduciary duty by remaining committed to its planned acquisition by 3Com Corp and not seeking other bids for the firm: the suit looks to us transparently frivolous and meretricious, but people can still be found to defend such ludicrous misuse of the law.
Chipcom Corp is very unlikely to be worth as much to anyone else as it is to 3Com Corp, and Cabletron Systems Inc has now announced that it will not seek to acquire the company, having concluded that a combined Chipcom-3Com Corp entity would likely have a weakened competitive product position; Cabletron will instead focus its efforts on winning over Chipcom and 3Com customers
while the merger is pending and efforts to integrate technologies take place; perhaps Ms Nappo should sue Cabletron and its directors for raising her hopes so recklessly, and then dashing them.
Tele Danmark A/S holds 25% of the Irish Mobicall consortium, which has submitted a tender for the second digital cellular licence to establish and operate a network in Ireland: equal partners in the consortium are Southwestern Bell Telephone Co, Deutsche Telepost Consulting, and three local Irish partners jointly hold another 25%.
Digital Equipment Corp says Bernhard Auer quit as vice-president and general manager of the personal computer unit to pursue other interests; asked if he had plans to join another company, DEC said He hasn’t shared those plans with us.
Apple Computer Inc reports that another repetitive strain injury case has bitten the dust: the suit, in which plaintiff Carolyn Brust had claimed in the San Francisco Superior Court that her use of an Apple keyboard and mouse injured her hand, was dismissed after five days of trial; the dismissal came during presentations of the plaintiff’s case and before Apple had begun to present its defence, the company noted, because Judge James Warren ruled there was no scientific basis for Ms Brust’s claims.
UK Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine is looking for a big boost to the balance of payments from Siemens AG’s planned chip plant: The Siemens plant will make a substantial contribution to the balance of payments by providing ú200m import substitution and ú700m exports every year, he declared.
Toronto-based Kolvox Communications Inc has joined forces with IBM Corp to create the largest worldwide distribution network of speech recognition products for personal computers: Kolvox will distribute the entire family of IBM VoiceType products via its worldwide network of 300 resellers and will convert its two most popular voice-enabled application, OfficeTALK and LawTALK, to IBM’s VoiceType Dictation system under OS/2 Warp and Windows.
Despite the howls of anguish from Ivrea when we originally ran the story, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA is still thought to be seeking a strategic ally for its loss-making personal computers unit although an outright sale is thought unlikely, analysts told Reuters: A joint venture with an Asian producer is the most likely outcome, said a Milan equities analyst who declined to be named – an alliance could turn the business round at a single stroke, he added; Hewlett-Packard Co has also been mentioned as a possible partner for the business.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has a $90m order from Central Japan Digital Phone Ltd for further expansion of its digital cellular net in Nagoya.
Alps Electric Co Ltd is to form a joint venture in Tianjin, China, to produce keyboards, electronic components: the venture, Tianjin Alps Electronics Co Ltd, capitalised at $5m, will be owned 80% by Alps (China) Co Ltd, a Peking-based wholly-owned unit of Alps, and 20% by Tianjin Zhonghuan Electric & Machine-Electric Component Corp China; the company, to be formed on August 10, is expected to create 200 jobs initially and 900 by March 1998, and to do $1.8m a month to start with, rising to $9.5m a month in 1997-98; the products from the plant will be marketed worldwide.
Strongly denying Computergram’s claims that it has had problems with its Ramac disk array (well it would say that, wouldn’t it – we keep forgetting that IBM now says it was always meant to grind to a halt once it was configured in the sort of sizes large users want, but then this isn’t a problem because such users can always go to EMC Corp) IBM Corp said that it has shipped another 1,000 of the disk arrays since its June announcements, bringing the total systems shipped to 5,500 for the year to date, and that it is shipping to known demand until well into the fourth quarter; it said that talk of its new product, Seascape, was a red herring, since it is next year’s product, and people needing storage tend to buy immedi
ately.
Commenting on the delay of its Magstar tape drive (CI No 2,720), IBM Corp said that the problem had been in high volume production quality, and not any technical shortfall with the product; it claimed that the Escon version had been put back 60 days – but don’t be fooled, that’s not the date when the thing will ship, but the date when IBM will tell you the date on which it will ship, and IBM in the US says that is in the second half of next year; the UK company would not comment about why or how many staff had been pulled off the project, or where they had gone (CI No 2,720).
It would seem that the reason IBM Corp’s Parallel Sysplex is slow to catch on (CI No 2,685) is that potential customers are waiting for the new version of DB2, due out in the autumn, actually to begin implementing Sysplex; the new DB2 will provide full data sharing facility, enabling users to exploit the benefits of clustering CMOS processors fully; the company said that customers are going through a learning process, the first stage of which may simply be installing the hardware, and while it would take time for them to learn to use the systems fully, in a year or so Parallel Sysplex will be fully operational, business as usual – except of course at all those really large users with vast batch jobs that just cannot be clustered.
