Business may be suffering in the current climate, but the DEC top brass is all smiles
Billed as Europe’s largest single exhibition and synposium, DECville 90 is back in town. The town of course is Cannes, and over the next two weeks some 5,000 invited European decision-makers will be turning their suited backs on the blue skies, warm sun and golden sands for the high tech world created in the Palais de Congres. Here the visitors can choose between 30 different plenaries, presentations and workshops, or visit the 200 demonstrations taking place on the 63,000 square foot exhibition floor. $50m of computer hardware and software, much of it introduced in the past 12 months, is on show. It is linked by three miles of local area networks serving some 600 nodes on the DEC EasyNet. This may be a problem year for Digital Equipment, but there is no sign of recession or depression at Digital. As DEC president Ken Olsen confirmed at the opening ceremony, despite the tight marketplace, DEC is continuing to invest 12% of revenues in research and development – currently $1,600m per annum. The major areas of investment activity cover Unix, networks and collaborative projects with specialist industry companies. Geoff Shingles, DEC managing director, sees DECville 90 as being the year that Unix became central to the company’s operations, central to the total strategy. Shingles admits that the present market conditions are crippling. In particular, high interest rates are hitting business – not the consumer. Manufacturers of course do not have votes. Shingles believes that we are seeing all the signs of a recession – a lot of users are talking about a lot of things but they never actually buy anything. DEC meanwhile is increasingly following the sponsorship route, especially of the Arts. Such events as the Monet exhibition at London’s Royal Academy are seen as being a major marketing tool. Even DECville is seen as a form of sponsorship – generating a good image and impressing delegates that DEC is a high tech company capable of delivering instant solutions. When it comes to the New IBM announcements, DEC is considerably more relaxed. Most IBM announcements, says Geoff Shingles, are a non-event. We have all been talking about them for ages. In fact, DEC sees the IBM 390 developments as being a natural reaction to its high end VAX 9000 launch. Even DEC’s stock market price moved up on the IBM news. It just goes to prove, says Shingles, that the mainframe market, far from being down and out, is flourishing. Already, DEC has taken orders worth some $250m including orders from Lloyds Bank and Mercury Communications. Getting everything to work together is the way ahead for DEC, and in today’s environment, a standalone personal computer is as much use as a standalone telephone according to Shingles. DECville 90 sees a positive shift in emphasis from the previous event at Cannes. Portable applications, running everything together – Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard – is moving from being the world’s worst secret to being signalled far and wide. IBM, says Digital, is still talking about Systems Application Architecture, whereas DECnet has been doing a similar job for years. In market terms, DEC is highlighting the insurance, retail, food and beverage markets as being areas of growth. Similarly with Electronic Data Interchange, where DEC is a user, it claims to have a strong lead over most of its competitors. On mergers and acquisitions, there is no hint of the company doing either, but it is busily forming collaborative marketing and technology partnerships.
Bullet-proof balance sheet
Mark Steinkrauss, DEC’s director of Investor Relations, says that the company has a bullet-proof balance sheet. Its financial position is as strong as any computer company in the industry, and its cash flow remains extremely strong – so strong that DEC has been buying back its stock over the past few weeks. He went on to say that profitability is being tackled by stringent cost cutting and stronger marketing. Voluntary staff reductions are on-going and the company is lo
oking to shed a further 5,000 employees in the near future. However, there is no master redundancy plan, and it is up to each country manager to make local decisions. When it comes to what’s new, DECville 90 is showing the first DECnet integration product in the Ultrix environment, along with demonstrations of VMS/Open Systems Interconnection-based systems integrating with non-Digital products. There is also the first showing of full integration between Token-Ring, Appletalk, TCP/IP and Ethernet. Customer services are being heavily featured as are discrete and process manufacturing for industry and retail trades. There is certainly enough activity at the event to keep delegates off the beaches and away from the casinos for the duration of their stay. – Alan Simpson
DECville Miscellany
The presence of no fewer than three vice-presidents at DEC’s Customer Centre was said to underline the company’s role as a systems integrator in the 1990s: things of interest included the Intelligent Building Service for on-site installation of systems and networks in an infrastructure supporting both DEC and multi-vendor equipment; also worth a glance is DEC’s Strategic Facilities Management services – the company groups these functions into systems management, operations management, network management and maintenance. d e cIn the government and science arena, DEC is showing a prototype of Datacentralen’s Ultrix-based Astra document production system developed as part of the Astra Esprit project: other firsts include Wavefront Technologies’ Advanced Visualizer on DECstation 5000. d e cAlso featured at the opening of the event was of course Digital France SA managing director Michel Ferreboeuf, who highlighted the fact that while the US might have let the side – and the company – down in fiscal 1990 to June 30, DEC France had seen a 20% hike in sales. d e cThese grandiose events are all about image, so DEC is highlighting its image skills with the first showing of its VAXcamera facility.
