Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme could be the only European concern capable of competing on a worldwide scale with the US and Japanese giants, or a disaster waiting to happen. But before the 78%-owned Siemens affiliate can really start to prove its worth in the market, there are a number of burning issues that need to be sorted out following the fusion of two companies with radically different corporate cultures. Like, for example, the colour of the badge on future Siemens Nixdorf offerings, or the allocation of parking spaces at group headquarters. The Wall Street Journal reports that mid-level marketing managers spent hours debating whether to paint the joint product line in Nixdorf red or the Siemens petrol – a shade of blue. The Siemens marketers felt that red wasn’t special enough, believing that Siemens petrol was unique. Whatever the arguments were for Nixdorf red, the controversy eventually reached board level where it was decided in half an hour that Siemens petrol should prevail simply because Siemens had just bought a vast job lot of the paint for its other electronics products. And then there’s the question of parking spaces. Within the Siemens hierachy, executives are allotted company cars and private parking spaces according to rank, whereas at the more democratic Nixdorf the criteria for such privileges are based on need – even the late Heinz Nixdorf himself didn’t get a reserved space.
Militant users
No doubt such differences will eventually be settled, but in the meantime it is the decisions of the seven workgroups set up to guide the direction of the company due to come into being this October which will have a much more far-reaching effect on the success or otherwise of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme. A few weeks ago, Workgroup 2 announced a corporate structure organised strictly around ten perceived customer groups, with these ten divisions supported by regional arms (CI No 1,477). Now, Computerwoche reports that Workgroup 1 – the group charged with making the most important recommendations – deciding which products out of the existing Siemens and Nixdorf offerings should survive – has announced its conclusions, and much to the relief of Nixdorf’s band of increasingly militant users, it turns out that the future product range will by and large include all existing hardware and software offerings from both firms. Above all, Siemens’ proprietary BS2000 mainframe operating system, used on the broad line of compatible mainframes that goes from top-end machines it gets from Fujitsu down to desk-top models, will stay, despite the risk that the non-IBM-compatible machines will experience a sudden dwindling of the user base. What’s more, Siemens Nixdorf will continue to market and support two separate Unix ranges, the Sinix machines of Siemens and the Targon supermicros developed by Nixdorf. Unlike Hewlett-Packard, which swiftly announced an intensive merging of product development when it acquired Apollo, Siemens Nixdorf says that common successors to both ranges will only start appearing within the time scale of a normal development cycle, in a way intended to protect existing installations. Due to the relatively short time period involved, the first jointly-developed product is likely to be a new personal computer – practically no compatibility problems exist in Siemens and Nixdorf technology in this area, claims Bernhard Wbker, who is to be in charge of products planning.
-By Mark John-
The core of the Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme personal computer range will be based on AT and Micro Channel buses, with MS-DOS, Unix and OS/2 operating system options. An 80386SX-based Micro Channel machine is also expected shortly, and 80386- and 80486-based versions will be available mid-1991. All technical changes to products that have already been announced – such as the controversial move to Intel chips and AT&T Unix System V.4 for the Siemens MX range (CI No 1,448, CI No 1,460), and the switch to the Motorola 68040 processor for the Targon/31s (CI No 1,497) – will be supported and contin
ued by the new organisation. As planned, the Targon/33 will become the fault-tolerant offering within the Unix range, and the Targon/35 will be the first to be equipped with a RISC chip from MIPS Computer Systems Inc – Siemens WX workstations will be RISC-based from mid-1991. Siemens Nixdorf will develop an application programming interface based on standards and the most important elements of the Sinix and TOS Unix implementatios: We want to make it quite unequivocal to our existing customers that their investment in application software is protected now and in the future, states Wbker. The interface specification – labelled SNI-API – will be published and developers encouraged to write to it, he continued. The outdated Quattro/8870 line will be kept on, despite the fact that virtually no new business is coming from this range at all – a clear response to the 80,000 users of the business computer. On the other hand, development of Nixdorf’s 8890 IBMulators will be stopped – a move expected ever since Nixdorf decided that its future lay with Unix – but support for existing installations will continue. Wbker is hopeful that 8890 users will prefer to migrate to the BS2000 system rather than to remain in the IBM world by opting for the IBM variant offered by Comparex Informationssysteme, with which Nixdorf made a deal some time ago to unburden itself of its 8890 clients. To underline Siemens’ commitment to its proprietary mainframe, the performance at the top end of the BS2000 line will be increased to 500 MIPS; new 1 to 20 MIPS machines are planned for use with a number of cheap office application peripherals.
Wasting asset
In the areas of communication and networks, Siemens Nixdorf is basing its products on a number of protocols, de facto and official standards including TCP/IP, the open systems interconnection model, LAN Manager, proprietary and public network types and integrated services digital network services; IBM SNA links will be available for all Siemens Nixdorf systems, and will be supported by future Unix-based Siemens Nixdorf network management systems. In telecommunications, the future is not so concrete – for the time being, all that has been been confirmed is that Nixdorf’s 8818 digital private branch exchange will remain and continue to be developed; discussions as to how the rest of the Nixdorf and Siemens telecommunications product lines can be harmonised are still going on. Finally, it has been confirmed that all existing support and service agreements will be taken over in their entirety by the new organisation. As a whole, Horst Nasko, chief of Nixdorf and deputy to Siemens’ Hans-Dieter Wiedig – expected to head up Siemens Nixdorf – looks to have succeeded in avoiding the asset-stripping that could have occurred following the takeover, but what could emerge as a result of Siemens’ concessions is a weaker company – for example, Siemens Nixdorf will be marketing two almost directly competing Unix lines until it can come up with a successor to both. And the main area in which Siemens is determined to stick to its guns – namely, the proprietary, non-IBM-compatible BS2000 mainframe operating system – looks threatened: all non-IBM proprietary mainframe bases are wasting assets these days.
