ITL Group Plc, Hemel Hempstead has broadened its software licence agreement with fault-tolerant Unix and Pick systems builder Sequoia Systems Inc, Marlboro, Massachusetts, and it is now an OEM agreement under which ITL will take Sequoia’s newly-announced Series 200 family of 68020-based multiprocessor systems for marketing in the UK. Sequoia claims that the 200, which goes from four to 64 processors, offers the lowest cost-per- transaction of any such system: with six processors, the machine is rat-ed at 83 debit-credit transactions per second and costs $929,000, while Sequoia says a similarly-priced Stratus XA2000- 140 does 50 per second and a top-end Tandem does 100 per second but costs $4m. The 200 runs the Sequoia Topix fault-tolerant Unix kernel which is claimed to conform to the System V Interface Definition, and the kernel supports the Concurrent Operating Systems Technology-developed Open Architecture Pick (CI No 574). An entry-level Series 200 with four CPUs is $400,000. In Japan, CJK is marketing the machines, and the company, which has sold about a dozen of its 68010-based Series 100s in year one, has raised $12m in its latest round of venture funding, mainly from new sources. Some of the cash is likely to go into a European sales net.