The operating business and outstanding contracts of Orion Associates Inc, Monte Carlo, have been jointly acquired by the UK and German operations of Arix Corp, while the rest of its user base has gone to SCI Systems Inc, Huntsville, Alabama. Orion, a holding company for Fortune Systems Corp, Belmont, California, has called a meeting of shareholders next month to decide its fate, because, as a spokesman declared, there is now not a lot left of Orion. Fortune’s hardware side was sold to SCI in 1987, but a comeback was made with a management buyout of Fortune’s international operations from SCI in June of the same year, and that company signed an OEM deal with Arix a year later. Arix, which says it has been working on the deal for the last six months, will transfer Orion’s Indonesian, Dutch, German and Austrian OEM and distribution business into its own OEM operations, Orion’s customers will be integrated into Arix’s own customer base. Orion also has a $25m OEM deal with Motorola, signed last year, though no-one at Motorola was available to comment last week.
