Data General Corp has seen it all over its 20-year-plus history so it has to see the superhuman effort to transform the Marlborough minimaker into a shining new champion of open systems with a sense of deja vu. The company was flat on its back, dead in the water, everybody’s favourite acquisition candidate back at the turn of the last decade – then it came out with its first 32-bit minicomputer, the MV/8000, offering dramatically better price-performance than DEC’s VAX-11/780 and better backwards compatibility with its 16-bit machines than DEC offered with PDP-11 users on the VAX, and within a couple of years, DEC’s Ken Olsen was forced to admit that DEC had not been watching Data General too closely – perhaps we should. After a panic to design the VAX 8600, DEC got itself back in the race in late 1984, and two years after that, obituary notices were being written for Data General all over again. Today, the white hope for the future is the 88000 RISC-based AViiON Unix family, and early signs are that the same kind of dramatic contracts that characterised the heydey of the MVs are starting to come in for the AViiON.

Fourth Wave

But one thing is different this time: always before, the ultimate responsibility for the company was in the hands of one man, co-founder Edson de Castro. This time around, Ed de Castro has stepped back to take the post of chairman and a new man, fresh to the struggle, is at the helm. That man is Ronald Skates, installed late last year as chief executive. Ron Skates came to Data General as heir apparent with something of an unusual background for a computer company chief – he was a partner at the giant Price Waterhouse & Co accountancy firm when he was plucked from his figures and installed as heir apparent to the Great Man. He had worked on many computer accounts, some of them bigger than Data General, so the industry was not exactly new to him. And there has been no question of easing gently into the driving seat – all but one of the old guard of Data General vice-presidents has been cleared out since Skates came on board. But does a bean-counter have the vision to pilot a $1,500m-a-year computer company that has got left behind by its siblings into what Ed de Castro describes as the Fourth Wave of the computer industry, the Open Wave? Coming from an accountant, Skates’ response could be seen as encouraging. His message to the naysayers is that making a loss for the past three years has been all part of the plan. I think we have already turned the corner. We staked out a strategy that would take us into open systems three years ago. We had two choices, we could continue to be very profitable, telling everyone we were investing in the future but just being very profitable off the back of our Eclipse range of machines. Or we could invest in Open systems. We’ve spent millions of dollars doing the latter. He doesn’t think that proprietary systems will die overnight ask Wang Laboratories about that – but he is more circumspect on financial matters and won’t make any forecasts about when the company will turn the corner decisively back into profits, nor when its growth, stalled for three years, will resume. –

By Peter White

But he is more bullish about the idea of getting AOS operating system user to convert to Unix. If I am an Eclipse user, open systems are a lot cheaper if I am starting a new system from scratch. But I don’t want to replace my Eclipse any sooner than I have to. So I don’t think that proprietary systems are dead. They’re not where the action is, but if I have one of these proprietary machines, and I have a supplier prepared to continue to take the performance level of than machine to a higher level, then I’m going to sit tight for a while. That doesn’t mean that we at Data General aren’t going to go gangbusters to move our existing customers over to AViiONs. But we do have a new top-end MV planned.But when everyone sells open systems, why should anyone buy from Data General? In the open systems market hardware technology is a given. By that I mean that every player must ha

ve, and will have, an advanced hardware platform. What is value-added on that will make the difference and that I believe will be software availability and interconnect skills. Going for Data General on the applications side is that the 88open binary compatible standard has cut porting times to as litte as 10 minutes and Skates says they are going up at a rate of one a day. On communications, Skates promises SNA for the AViiON by year-end and Open Systems Interconnection is announced for ships next year. And the new Communications Server software already provides links to IBM’s DisOSS and Profs, as well as X400 and facsimile and telex. Apart from networking, Data General’s Comprehensive Electronic Office, CEO, has traditionally been one of its strongest suits, landing huge enterprise-wide contracts with both US government departments and big financial users. What’s the future for that? Well the originators of CEO got the name wrong for a start: The new CEO is not going to be called CEO on the AViiON and it will be much more comprehensive. It will be out in June and while it will support all the CEO functions, we want to make it as open as possible so that other people’s software can interface to it. Aghast that Data General sold only 2% of the personal computers used in its accounts, Skates is determined to equip the company with a comprehensive and competitive line. And at the other end of the scale, Skates believes that RISC machines will have the maturity of software and the power to start replacing mainframes within two to three years – when the ECL version of the Motorola 88000, on which Data General is helping with design, is due out. Having as he sees it positioned the open systems strategy and product line correctly, Skates is keen to transform the approach of the sales force, knowing that sales must improve substantially if growth is to resume. The Data General line, he says, used to be We’ve got some great technology, do you want it?

UK model

And, as the company’s most profitable subsidiary anywhere in the world, the UK is being offered to the rest of the company as a model of how to do it right. The UK is attuned to customer needs, he says. Another switch is that the company is chasing those big accounts again. Ed de Castro had scaled back the investment in bids for major accounts after he heard time and time again that DEC and AT&T and IBM were to get the business, not because they had the best products, but because they were bigger. The $127m US Department of the Interior contract – now under dispute – is an example of the kind of business Skates wants, and believes he can get. That particular bid was just about the most comprehensive series of tests of open standards conducted anywhere in the world, and we won it, he says, and his eyes start to gleam. Attaboy!