As the dust settles round the proposed sale of Chen Systems Inc’s server business to Sequent Computer Systems Inc, the software remainder of the company says it will change its name and carry on regardless. Sequent is buying the hardware assets of Chen and the yet-to-be-renamed software concern will be led by Chen Systems’ current chairman Paul Limb, as would-be president and chairman. It hasn’t appointed a chief executive just yet, but current manager of product development Kitrick Sheets is understood to be in the running. The new company will start life with 20 employees, the other 30 are going over to Sequent. It’s promising more details in August, but claims it is already close to completing an implementation of its AutoPilot suite of dynamic performance and optimization capabilities to Windows NT that’s expected over the summer. It believes NT is where its best opportunity lies, but says it is also talking to a bunch of other possible OEM RISC vendors. AutoPilot is considered to be a key component of Chen’s technology and in its original manifestation included hardware and software that automatically optimized input-output and processor performance and balanced the application workload across the one- to eight-way 133MHz Pentium Chen-1000 servers. Subsequently Chen developed the technology as a software-only system. AutoPilot enables system administration and application development with manual fine tuning and acts as an intelligent scheduler preventing increases in bus connections. It predicts bus saturation levels and impacts the way tasks hit the system bus enabling processors to operate at up to 80% of their capacity, claims the company. AutoPilot currently comes with the Chen-1000 systems running Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s UnixWare 2.0. Sequent is said to be interested in AutoPilot and as part of its deal with Chen has licensed the software. And Santa Cruz Operation Inc is also said to be using Chen technologies – including AutoPilot – to scale UnixWare.
