Excitement is mounting amongst companies in Sweden as the Government and Department of Defence are within days of announcing which lucky companies will be awarded the contracts to supply Unix-based machines for its second purchasing phase. The purchasing specification is issued jointly by the Government and Department of Defence but contracts will be awarded separately. The final contenders for the civil administration contract include Sweden’s own Data Industrier AB (DIAB) selling its own machines; Dator Seringen offering Arete and Cromemco hardware; Carl Lamm with Pyramid and Zilog boxes; Unisys; NCR; and Ericsson which offers Sun Microsystems’ workstations. On the defence side both NCR and DEC are reported to be out of the running: NCR because of its failure to meet the communications criteria and DEC because its Unix implementation is not in line with the specification. Unisys and its 5000 family is still in with a chance even though it did not show in the previous round, this, the company claims, was due to the fact that it had no offices there. The partnership between Norsk Data and Diab is also a strong contender for the defence contract which will be implementing a combination of the two companies’ machines should its bid prove successful. Whilst admitting that the Swedish Government makes no exceptions for Swedish companies failing to meet the specification criteria Norsk and Diab feel that once it has been met home-grown companies may well be favoured. Although Norsk is not Swedish it considers itself to be the next best thing as it comes from Norway and has a Swedish partner. To date around 150 Unix machines have been installed for civil administration and 200 in defence.
