Demonstrating that it really is back in the rudest of health, Marlborough, Massachusetts-based Sequoia Systems Inc yesterday announced that it is to acquire Texas Microsystems Inc, the privately-held Houston, Texas manufacturer of environmentally-rugged and fault-tolerant microcomputer systems for industrial and telecommunications applications. The acquisition marks a significant diversification for Sequoia because apart from building ruggedised Sparc-based systems, Texas Microsystems’ main business is building sort-of fault-tolerant iAPX-86 MS-DOS machines (CI No 1,818, 1,828) fault-tolerance being achieved by using a monitoring co-processor rather by using multiple processors. Back in 1991, the company was looking for a substantial base in Europe. Under the agreement, Sequoia will issue 5.2m new shares for Texas and its manufacturing affiliate, valuing the deal at an indicated $20m, which suggests that the target is unprofitable, since that buys some $45m of volume, up from $35m in 1991, and doubles the size of Sequoia, resulting in a company with annualised revenues of nearly $90m; the combined companies presently employ more than 400 people worldwide and Texas Micro will be run as a separate subsidiary of Sequoia Systems.
