Integrated Micro Products Plc, in the process of being acquired by Sun Microsystems Inc for $96.1m cash (CI No 2,878), currently sells its $50,000-to-$200,000 ft-Sparc and SeriesFT Motorola Inc 68000- and 88000-based machines almost exclusively to switch manufacturers such as Fujitsu Ltd, DSC Communications Corp and L M Ericsson Telefon AB, as well as to Motorola Inc, its largest customer. Sun said one of the reasons it was persuaded to acquire the company is that potential customers were unwilling to buy Sparc systems from a concern as small as Integrated Micro. Development of the one-to-four-way SuperSparc II system started at the end of 1993, they went into beta test at the end of 1994 and shipped at the beginning of 1995. Sun made its approach at the end of last year; Integrated Micro’s first quarter turnover was $5.1m, of which Sparc system ships accounted for 44%; the rest were Motorola sales. The firm plans no further Motorola- based designs. It expects to do $25m this year. It achieves fault-tolerance by hardware replication and software patented in the areas of failed modules and locking clock signals, and is currently working on an UltraSparc unit; as well as offering standard Integrated Micro boxes, Sun is expected to build the fault-tolerant technology into other servers to put even more emphasis on the telecommunications market, which is already worth some $1,000m to it. It says Unix rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp have nothing that can compete with it and it will also be going hard after Stratus Computer Inc and Tandem Computers Inc. It plans to exploit the technology in its financial and Internet markets. By combining manufacturing technologies at its Linlithgow, Scotland facility with Integrated Micro’s Consett plant, Sun will also build on the target’s valuable Network Equipment Building Standard capability for other Sun products. One of Integrated Micro’s key advantages is the processor-independent virtual machine layer it created to move to the Sparc architecture. Sun would not say whether it plans to offer the technology for other instruction sets as it has done with Solaris.
