It might be thought that tools developed specifically for Digital Equipment Corp’s OpenVMS were a rapidly wasting asset – after all, DEC has bowed to the Young Master and decreed that its VAX users should migrate over time to Windows NT, but Sector Communications Inc, McLean, Virginia has bought an 80% stake in a Swiss company, HIS Technologies AG, which develops and markets the X-Maestro Series of modular systems management tools for OpenVMS. Sector is paying $1.2m cash and 4.8m new Sector shares for the Zurich company – and effectively the deal seems to be a rescue to help HIS get out of the bind that OpenVMS is a dying market – the cash will be used to develop Unix and Windows NT versions of X-Maestro. Sector says the X-Maestro Series is used by major banks, pharmaceutical companies, large industrial companies, and at government and military sites and reckons the total potential market is still over 1million servers worldwide.
