Bromcom Computers Ltd of Bromley, Kent is capitalising on the 1988 Education Reform Act and moving in on the education market with its QC family of multi-user micro systems. The key to Bromcom’s entry into this market is its close association over the past six to nine months with local education authorities by working on Local Management of Schools project management with them. Under this scheme it has been talking to up to 20 local authorities, and Bromcom’s managing director Ali Guryel thinks that between five to 10 contracts should result from this contact in the next few months, each worth up to UKP500,000. Of course the education sector already has seasoned vendors such as Acorn and Research Machines for Bromcom to compete with, but Guryel believes that his company’s QC-386 family is far more cost effective than the hardware being offered by such companies. The difference being that the QC-386 enables users to access material through serial terminals as opposed to a network. Guryel claims that Bromcom’s multi-user machines have a faster access time than can be obtained on networked micros and costs approximately 30% less than an equivalent networked solution. The company says that a wide range of software is supported by the QC-386, such as Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and SideKick, all of which can be run in single-user, multi-user and network versions. The schools administration software packages SIMS and SAS also run on QC-386. Bromcom may bundle software with its hardware if required by local education authorities, but this will not be a blanket policy. Of course the QC-386 is a 32-bit 80386-chip MS-DOS machine, and it is widely believed that one of the standards to emerge from the Local Management of Schools will be the Unix operating system. Consequently, Bromcom has announced that as from the end of the year Unix will be implemented on the QC family. Should Bromcom crack the education market then it will be well on the way to making its projected 1992 stock market listing.
