NCR Corp chief executive Charles Exley Jr, president Gil Williamson and senior vice president Elton White made a flying visit to the UK yesterday, brandishing hot-off-the press copies of NCR’s 1989 annual report and carrying the message of the company’s new Open Co-operative Computing strategy, revealed a few weeks back in the US (CI No 1,365). According to Exley, the disappointing 1% decline in turnover this year, to $5,956m, was due both to a continued weak market demand (especially in the US) and to the adverse effect of exchange rate changes on international business. Meanwhile, he said, earnings per share rose to a new record of $5.38, due to the company buying in 9.4m shares – and in December NCR announced an authorisation paving the way for another $15m shares of common stock purchases over the next two years. This, said Exley, was financed by improved asset utilisation, with asset turnover reaching a high for the decade, and rates of return on equity and assets strong. Research and development spending was increased by 7% now standing at an all-time high of 7.5% of turnover. In terms of products, the major growth areas were NCR’s industry-specific terminal systems for retail and financial users, and the Unix-based Tower series of mid-range, multi-user systems, which now contribute the largest slice – $850m – of overall revenue. Major declines were seen in revenue from large systems and communications processors. General purpose workstations business – including personal computers running MS-DOS and OS/2 suffered a 19% decline, attributed to a narrow product offering during the early part of 1989, but since then the company has introduced its 80486-based Micro Channel machine, along with more 80386 and 80286 offerings. These figures were reflected in organisational changes last year that resulted in the formation of two main company groups – the Integrated Systems Group for end-user systems, and the General Purpose Product Group for general purpose development systems for NCR, third parties and customers. And in November, NCR improved its distribution channels for low-end products by signing an international agreement with Businessland Inc. Although at first sight the Open Co-operative Computing announcement appears as nebulous as the many similarly-named initiatives from other hardware vendors launched of late, NCR does appear to have some fairly solid intentions under the banner, with the first announcements due during the second half of the year. For a start, NCR has a better foundation of open computing experience than many of its competitors: it has been vigorously selling Unix machines for the past decade, while encouraging migration from its proprietary lines and ramping up MS-DOS and OS/2 lines. Open Co-operative Computing will use a layered software approach using standard interfaces wherever possible – Presentation Manager and Motif at the user interface level down to MS-DOS, OS/2 and Unix at the operating system, and including the database standard SQL. This year will see the launch of the Co-operation software package, likely to be based on Hewlett-Packard’s NewWave Office software according to US press reports, though Exley would not confirm this. The software, according to Gil Williamson, would be the first from NCR not tied to the hardware, and would include collaborative services, office services and workgroup computing, running on top of a client-server distributed computing model. This is likely to be MS-DOS and OS/2 initially, with Unix support available next year. Independent software vendors are currently working with NCR to integrate their products within the architecture. Meanwhile, proprietary NCR users will have the opportunity to connect or migrate to open systems. A Unix slice is already offered on NCR’s top-end V-Series mainframes, enabling file transfers between the two environments, with similar stategies for the I-Series mid-range and fault tolerant systems. We will continue to offer users power increases, said Exley but feel that in the 1990s, the whole nature of the computin
g market will change towards microprocessor-based systems. We will provide the software tools to allow users to implement or re-implement their -systems onto the new generation.
