Gossip that Sun Microsystems Inc might make a move on Cray Research Inc has been revived by the appointment of highly-regarded Sun alumnus Phillip Samper as chief executive of Cray, but cultural differences between the companies are thought to make takeover unlikely.
Sun Microsystems Inc unveils its Hot Java and Sunscreen software products tomorrow: Hot Java is designed to enable businesses to create more exciting home pages on the World Wide Web, and Sunscreen firewall hardware and software to enable companies to set up their own private global networks by piggybacking on the Internet rather than leasing high-capacity lines – offices in two different cities can each buy Sunscreen for $25,000 and create an encrypted link between the two offices over the Internet.
Compaq Computer Corp on Friday cut prices on most of its Presario 500, 700 and 900 Series of home personal computers by as much as 12%: the cuts cover 11 models in the multimedia line, and include most of the Pentium-based models so that the Presario CDS 744 is off 6% at an e stimated street price of $1,600 and the Presario CDS 982 now sells for $2,200, for a 12% reduction.
Japan’s Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications plans to establish a standard for infra-red communications for personal computer local area networks: the standard, to be set in collaboration with manufacturers, is due in the autumn.
International CableTel Inc, the high bidder – with ú14.4m a year – for the franchise, duly won bidding to cable Northern Ireland for television: the UK province has 428,000 homes and CableTel reckons the award makes it the third largest cable operator in the UK; it has until 2003 to build the network.
BellSouth Corp’s BellSouth Telecommunications Inc, currently the largest telephone holding company in the US, plans to lay off between 9,000 and 11,000 employees over the next two years to meet competition.
Francois Fillon has been appointed France’s Minister for Information Technologies and Postal Services on Thursday, giving posts and telecommunications their own ministry again: he will take charge of the liberalisation of French telecommunications and the dismantling of France Telecom’s monopoly and become the boss of the telecommunications regulator, Bruno Lassere.
Tampa, Florida-based Group Technologies Corp is to buy manufacturing equipment and other assets in Hortolandia, Sao Paulo state from IBM Corp ‘s Brazilian operation and will use the equipment to stuff surface-mounted circuit boards and do other electronic assembly for IBM and other customers; terms were not disclosed; Brazilian law allows foreign companies to sell personal computers and related electronics at a significant tax advantage if the motherboard is produced and the thing is assembled within Brazil.
Now that ferro-electric memory pioneer Ramtron International Corp has diversified into what it calls Enhanced dynamic random-access memory chips, it has decided to put the latter into a new wholly-owned subsidiary, Enhanced Memory Systems Inc, which will start life with 22 people at Ramtron’s headquarters in Colorado Springs; IBM Corp signed up this month to be a second source for the new chips (CI No 2,660).
Siemens AG is to make memory chips designed by MoSys Inc, San Jose, which it is claimed could cut the cost of high-performance graphics boards by up to 50%: the chips are called MDRAMs for Multibank Dynamic RAMs, but MoSys is not saying what technique is used to make them faster than video RAMs – standard fast access time dynamics with an extra input-output port to speed operation and more expensive than parts used for ordinary main memory, and where the cost-saving comes from; it does claim that the peak bandwidth is greater than 660M-bytes per second and that net bandwidth exceeds competing memory by 250%.
Bell Atlantic Corp is to increase its stake in the Omnitel Pronto-Italia SpA cellular consortium, buying the stake Lehman Brothers plans to sell, but it will not after all proceed with plans
to buy a 49% stake in the Stream multimedia unit of state-controlled Societa Finanziaria Telefonica per Azioni, Stet SpA; it says its technical skills were no longer necessary to Stet’s Stream unit with Stet’s new plans to extend fibre optic cabling out to 50% of the country by 1998.
Existing supplier California Microwave Inc, Sunnyvale reports that its Microwave Radio Corp subsidiary has a new order exceeding $1.6m for digital microwave radios to provide interconnections for the UK Orange Personal Communications Services Ltd personal communications net.
Welcome to the Armonkey House: eyebrows are being raised at the fact that while IBM Corp is making cuts, some swingeing, in the salaries of senior secretaries (CI No 2,667), chairman Louis Gerstner has hired a cook for the Armonk headquarters on a reported salary of $120,000.
NEC Corp has won its first US order for a supercomputer for nine years with a contract from the Geotechnology Research Institute in Houston for a $1.4m SX-4 machine, which bought a NEC SX back in 1986: the uniprocessor will do 2 GFLOPS peak.
Commenting on its figures, Sega Enterprises Ltd, which saw profits slump as a result of the high yen and poor sales abroad, pledged to boost overseas production to give future profits a lift; the company also plans to diversify, saying that profits had been dependent largely on consumer products and exports, and that it has to strengthen sales of games machines for business use (what does it mean?) and increase domestic sales; it plans to import products made at its foreign plants, buy more foreign-made parts and boost overseas production of games softw are and hardware, including its advanced Saturn 32-bit video games player.
France Telecom’s Intelmatique subsidiary says that Minitel services are now available via the Internet: a front-end server, accessed at http://www.minitel.fr, provides free information about the Minitel network and services and about the commercial and technical arrangements for obtaining such services; the free front desk service is available in French and English; access to services is available by agreement with Intelmatique or one of its distributors; such agreements assign users with identifier and personal password and open an account credited with a certain number of hours; users are charged for Minitel services by the minute; the rate depends on the firm with which the user opens an account.
Telxon Corp’s Itronix unit has a contract with Sears, Roebuck & Co’s Product Services unit to supply more than 14,000 technicians with wireless computing devices: terms were not disclosed, but field technicians will be in real-time wide area contact with the dispatchers.
Atari Corp and Virtuality Group Plc have been previewing their Jaguar VR, the virtual reality game system the Leicester company has been developing for Atari: the Jaguar VR includes Virtuality’s head-mounted display and optional track joystick with a docking station, which links the devices to the Jaguar system; Jaguar VR will be available at the end of this year and will cost $300 with two titles ready at launch; a compact disk player compatible with the Jaguar will ship in August and will be priced at about $150; a Team Tap peripheral that enables competitive simultaneous play for as many as four players on one Jaguar and will retail for $25.
In the Asia Pacific region, unit ships of personal computers rose 33% to 5.4m last year, Dataquest Inc reckons: it says the market in the region is now larger than that of Japan, which it excludes, despite the fact that Japan is an Asian country and is in the Pacific.
Puerto Rico-based Telefonica Larga Distanca Inc, the New World subsidiary of Telefonica de Espana SA, will begin offering long distance services in New York in June after the Federal Communications Commission gave it the green light – according to Les Echos, after two years of disputing AT&T Corp’s objections to its entry to the North American market, Telefonica Larga Distanca persuade
d the Commission to grant it a licence as a franchise operator; this limits it to an initial investment of $25m, but its president Hector Lugo said the company expects to capture 12% of the New York market, representing revenues of some $20m to $25m; after New York, the company, which is held 79% by Telefonica, will offer service to customers in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, pitching competitive call rates and targeting the Latin-American community; the licence is the latest success in the expansion by Telefonica Internacional SA, which is becoming more and more important to the phone group.
Rochester, New Hampshire-based Cabletron Systems Inc plans to open 10 Asia-Pacific offices in the next six months and triple its regional staff by the end of the year: the expansion would bring Cabletron’s offices to 14 in the Asia-Pacific and to over 80 worldwide; each new sales person will be supported by eight technical specialists in the14 Asia-Pacific offices, it said.
Computer Outsourcing Services Inc, formed a year or three back to offer payroll and data processing services from its New York City base, has completed its previously announced acquisition of Key ACA, Inc, a privately-held Boston-based payroll processing company that did $2.5m last year, taking the New Yorker’s annual business to $20m.
