Qontel Ltd, the company spawned from Motorola UK’s staff cut-backs last January, has changed direction. Qontel started life a year ago as a training and consultancy outfit but is now delivering Unix-based communications products. Qontelex, the first of the products available last year, has been followed in the last few weeks by QT-2000; a message switching system aimed at the low-end market. Brian Mills, sales and marketing director of Qontel, says that Qontelex is integrated into Quadraton’s Q-Office, Redwood’s Uniplex and Fortune’s Fortune Word. The Maidenhead, Berkshire company also says that the system has now been ported to machines from Convergent Technology, Fortune, Integrated Micro Products and Systems Reliability and IBM’s RT. It is aimed primarily at the OEM market and the company claims that five companies are currently evaluating it. Qontel says that Qontelex is superior to the current market leader in the field, S-Telex from Systems and Telecoms of Reading, because of its later development. Qontel also claims better presentation, easier adaptability and a cheaper price for its product over S-Telex. Systems and Telecoms say that it is currently unconcerned by the Qontel threat despite the fact that S-Telex was developed five years ago, adding that it is regularly upgraded, that the next upgrade is due in six weeks time, and it has never yet come across a software package that works correctly first time, so that S-Telex has the advantages of being tried and tested and a large user base. Systems and Telecoms claims that S-Telex has been approved by every Unix manufacturer except Indata AS of Norway. The retail price for Qontelex hardware and software is UKP2,950. The second communications product from Qontel is for the end-user market intended for use as a small business data processing system so that PC-DOS applications can be shared between all Personals on the server. This message switching system, QT-2000, is based on a Convergent Miniframe running the Qontelex software. The system may act as server for Personals, or as a telex and electronic mail system. QT-2000 has communications facilities for Ethernet, Telecom Gold and IBM. The entry-level price for the QT-2000 is UKP10,000.
