Daisy Systems Corp has been given more time by the US bankruptcy court in Denver to prepare its reasons why a motion from bondholders for summary winding up of the ravaged computer-aided engineering software company should not be granted. The petition has been brought because the bondholders fear that if Daisy is permitted to pursue its attempts to put togther a recovery plan, they will lose everything. Daisy defaulted at the end of last year on convertible debentures issued as part of its $200m acquisition of Cadnetix Corp. According to Electronic News, talks with potential buyers of the company have continued despite the problems and the loss of its line of credit from Heller Financial needed to buy Sun Microsystems workstations to pursue its business in the US. The paper quotes the company as saying that a large international corporation in the electronics business, which sounds very much like Racal Electronics Plc, and and independent investors group, are both negotiating possible acquisition. Racal already bought part of Cadnetix from Daisy after the acquisition, and might well reckon that the whole business might be worth having at the right price to bolster its ambitious Racal-Redac subsidiary. Daisy presently buys in workstations and bundles them with its software for resale, but says that the loss of the line of credit will hasten its plans to turn from a systems house into a pure software house. It has been taking Sun along on its sales trips and trying to persuade customers to split their orders and buy the hardware direct from Sun, software from Daisy. It had been planning to switch to a pure software operation with the release of the next generation of its software: at present its products use a hardware route engine that is networked to the workstations: the new software will eliminate this.
