Reinforcing its efforts to develop a strong pres-ence in the Unix market, ICL Deutschland has spent the last 12 months forming partnerships with a number of German software companies. The moves are part of a three-year rebuilding effort, triggered by a loss of several million pounds during the last financial year. The deals will enable ICL to offer a new range of software packages running on its M Series of Unix workstations or under Unix on its Intel iAPX-86 family micros. Companies and products involved include Infoplan of Cologne, which offers Indus, a Unixbased production planning and control system; an import export package for the mineral oil trade from the Unix software house MOP, and general trading and wholsale software from Weiblinger GmbH. German users will also be offered Merkur/NX, a proprietary package offering General Ledger, Sales Distribution and Order Processing ap-plications to run on Models 300 to 500 of the comp-any’s DRS series of machines. Meanwhile, ICL is using the Hannover fair to launch the latest X400 vers-ion of its Office Power software. ICL says that it will take at least two years for the results of its rebuilding strategy to become visible, but claims that Unix installations doubled to reach 300 during 1988. Meantime, it plans to strengthen its services, and make a number of key acquisitions. A comp-any spokesman hinted that the new partnership software companies will almost certainly be takeover targets.
