Novell Inc has formed a new business unit at the old Digital Research base in Monterey, California to focus on helping customers use commodity hardware and Novell’s client operating systems to build low-cost turnkey systems for manufacturing and service industry applications such as manufacturing process control, industrial automation and support of point-of-sale terminals – where it claims the Digital Research FlexOS has become the standard. The company says the Dedicated Systems Business Unit was formed in response to customer demand for additional networking functionality in dedicated systems, which it conceives of as dedicated systems with low system overhead, fast performance, built-in networking, real time response and graphics capabilities. The Dedicated Systems Business Unit will aim to ease the integration of dedicated systems into enterprise networks by marketing Novell’s client operating systems FlexOS, PalmDOS, DR DOS and Personal NetWare to manufacturers and value-added resellers that specialise in the development of such systems. Developer kits for these are available and the Dedicated Systems Business Unit offers training and consulting services.
