Meanwhile Data General Corp, which was not ready with its Open Systems strategy in time to bid for the OATS contract, has won instead its first major open systems contract for the Motorola 88000-based AViiON RISC systems from the US Interior Department’s water resources division (CI No 1,333). Worth $127m over seven years, the contract is the largest ever won by Data General, and follows on from a $15m reseller agreement from Zetaco Corp for AViiON systems. It will supply around 5,700 workstations and 300 servers running DG/UX. Software associated with the deal includes the Ingres relational database, GKS graphics library from Prior Data Sciences Ltd, the Tactition spreadsheet from Southwind Software Inc, and FrameMaker desktop publishing from Frame Technology Inc. Data General says it won the award in competition with Sun, Hewlett, DEC, Prime, Intergraph and Tektronix – Lockheed bidding Sun and SMS bidding Hewlett were the other finalists.
