There is little argument that Arix Corp – described as an eight year old $85m start-up by recently recruited product marketing director Jamie Enns – is currently going through difficult times. Only a year ago the company was still deriving around 70% of its revenues from a single OEM deal with Unisys Corp business that has stopped abruptly since Unisys decided it should be making more of its own hardware, and concentrating on Intel-based lines rather than Motorola. That business is now largely maintenance, and Arix has found itself struggling to re-position itself as a manufacturer under its own badge. That means it must become a market-led company, rather than the engineering-led outfit it has been. But according to Enns, anyone looking beyond the bottom line would see that non-Unisys business has been expanding healthily – details are set to be revealed next quarter. The key to the company’s future must now lie in its new generation System 90 hardware, which according to Enns has been built to handle the performance requirements of the next three to five years, with a 160 Mbyte-per-second bus, parallel processing expansion for input-output and an architecture as independent as possible from the CPU. By the end of the year, Arix hopes to be selling multi-processor 68040-based versions of the System 90 that will boost the current performance by at least eight times. But in the meantime, Arix salesmen have a problem convincing potential buyers that the 68020 processors in the System 90 will make the machines competitive. We had to take the decision to build a system for the future, and spent a lot of time on the architecture and operating system, rather than moving to a new chip. Enns claims he has the figures to show that the System 90 is right up there already in performance terms because of the input-output offloading the CPU, but Arix will no doubt breath a sigh of relief when the 68040 versions become available. In fact Arix has carried out most of the development work on a Sparc-based System 90 in the labs, and has also tried an 80486 version. But the major effort to get these systems to the market lies in the software. It would take years of effort to build up the robustness we have on the Motorola line, said Enns. Sparc or Intel versions of the machine are unlikely to see the light of day unless Arix can find partners willing to take on some of the load. RISC technology, says Enns, is not so important in the commercial environment, where some operations, such as Cobol strings, can actually take longer. Instead of RISC, Arix is looking to its Edgecore Technology division – acquired last year, to provide a boost in performance beyond the 68040. Edgecore’s Motorola-compatible super chip promises up to 15 tines the performance of the 68020, and Arix is working closely with Hitachi on high performance processors that retain binary compatibility with the 68040 line. Arix is also looking for partners to move it into the commercial arena, and Enns is currently working to expand its distribution and value-added reseller channels. We’re lean and hungry and very easy to work with at the moment, he said. – John Abbott
