Trying to emulate the success of its CLARiiON disk storage division, Data General Corp has created an independent unit to peddle its AV Image line of software products. The 30-strong software arm headed by vice-president William Zastrow starts out with around 20% of the $20m-odd business Data General does on imaging hardware-software combinations, with some 100 installations, 65% outside the US. The new version 1.5 of AV Image has improved batch scanning, indexing, large format imaging, high speed printing and facsimile utilities, the company says. AV Image is actually a collection of software technologies for commercial imaging, from which users can choose items to meet their particular requirements. The modules come from 18 different third party suppliers and are packaged and supported for Data General by UK firm Trimco Ltd. Trimco sells the suite as Target to the technical marketplace; both collections include Trimco’s image editor which Data General claims reduces image files to around 10% of the size of standard image files, enabling images to be processed at the rate of four or five a second. Data General claims to have made 400 changes to Target for the commercial market. It is seeking 40 or 50 imaging value-added resellers to market the stuff by the end of the year; it has about a dozen now. AV Image will also go through Data General’s 600-strong sales force, the company’s 1,000-odd value-added resellers, of which some 10% to 15% handle imaging systems, and other systems integrators. Hardware is provided through other Data General units. The company claims it can deliver hardware-software imaging combinations for less than half the price of the competition. It counts FileNet Corp, Wang Laboratories Inc, ViewStar Inc, Optika SA, Plexus Software Inc, LaserData Inc, PaperClip and Watermark Software Inc as its main rivals. AV Image is positioned as an enterprise-level system and packages start at five users and above costing from $700 per view client, $800 per view/scan. A new Express-Track batch scanning system that supports speeds up to 100 pages per minute costs $2,000 per client, Sybase clients are $200 each. The AV Image server software costs from $4,000 per server. Data General says real competitive gains begin to show in the 1,000-user range where prices are $250 to $350 per user. AV Image is up on DG/UX, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and DEC OSF/1 with Windows NT coming. Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres and Pick database support is included, and a Progress implementation is work in progress, Data General says.
