Following the sale by SHL Systemhouse Inc of the piece of Interactive Systems Corp that had originally been the most famous part of the old Lachman Associates Inc (CI No 2,078), executive vice-president of Interactive Ron Lachman can now claim the distinction of selling his company twice and buying it back once, and quipped that he has personally established a new executive benchmark, transactions per year, having sold Interactive to SunSoft, Praxis to SunSelect, Interactive to Systemhouse and having bought back Lachman, all in the space of the last 12 months. The piece of Interactive that Lachman bought is its 17-year-old 60-man network software products and consulting operation, a revenue stream currently producing around $9.8m a year. He intends continuing its work on Unix networking and the Unix file system and adding new products in Unix network file sharing and storage. He thinks he can grow the unit into a significant business, much of it coming perhaps from the Microsoft arena that, much as Lachman is a self-admitted Unix bigot, he knows he has to enter.
