NEC Corp, as reported briefly (CI No 1,653), this week announced the first fruits of its 10-year OEM agreement with Stratus Computer Inc, launching the Stratus 80860-based XA/R Model 20 fault-tolerant Unix machine as the NEC Super-Tolerant FT20. The price of the system has been set at the equivalent of $57,800 for a basic configuration with two CPUs, twin 32Mb main memories, cartridge tape and C&C-NET BranchCard II Local Area Network system and Stratus’ fault-tolerant implementation of Unix System V.4 with Japanese functions added. NEC says it is targeting the machine at the transaction processing market in the financial and distribution industries and in intelligent communications, linked to its digital telephone exchanges. NEC says it expects to sell 600 of the things over the next three years, up from its initial forecast when the announcement was made last September, of 500 units – because of greater than expected interest from customers according to Akira Kobayashi, executive vice-president and director. And 20% of the sales are expected to come from overseas, mainly in conjunction with PABX and public telephone exchange sales, but no special arrangement has made made with Stratus about non-competition and some is expected. First shipment is expected inNovember 1991. Aside from sales as database machines for use with exchanges, the balance of sales are expected from systems linked in with its Acos mainframes – but NEC was quick to point out that while competitor Fujitsu’s home-developed fault-tolerant machine was merely a front-end when used with a mainframe, the FT20 runs a full Unix operating system with additional Japanese language functions and can run any normal Unix applications such as Oracle Corp’s database. Hardware maintenance for the machine will be undertaken by the NEC Field Service subsidiary. According to NEC, Nippon Stratus is currently not planning to release the FT20 in Japan and is instead sticking to the XA2000 computer running the VOS operating system. NEC emphatically denied suggestions at the press conference that it would want to begin making its own fault-tolerant computer – Kobayashi pointed out that it was not longer the age were companies had to make everything themselves. They also denied that comparison of the costs of importing a completed product and developing and manufacturing a proprietary product had been weighed; the Stratus deal was an opportunity to take on leading edge technology, he said. NEC hopes to have 20% of the fault-tolerant market, which it forecasts at $1,000m, by 1993.
