Motorola Computer Systems and Logitek Plc have signed a marketing agreement under which Logitek is to be the primary UK distributor for Motorola’s Delta 8000 family. Motorola will continue to supply its industrial distributors and OEM customers, but is seeing this agreement as a way of heightening its profile by pushing RISC boxes into the commercial sector with its own name on them. Logitek on the other hand claims that while it is still committed to Altos Computer Systems, its dealer base is screaming out for a top end box above and beyond the capacity that Altos can provide. The attraction of the Delta series from Logitek’s point of view is that because it has a significant price and performance edge over competitive machines it offers dealers a fat margin. For example, in the 100-user market Motorola’s 8864-DP undercuts Hewlett-Packard’s 8255-32-571, Arix’s Model 80, and the MIPS M2000; while in the 150-user market the Motorola 8864-QP costs UKP165,000 for 50 MIPS against the equivalent MIPS M2000 priced at UKP238,000 which offers 23 MIPS. Furthermore, Logitek believes that application software for RISC hardware is no longer a problem following the agreement made by members of the 88open Consortium (CI No 1,127) under which all members will have their packages on the 88000 by January. Logitek believes that the majority of its dealers will sell the Deltas into vertical markets requiring large multi-user accounting systems.
How happy is Altos?
Although, in the short term they will be competing here with MIPS and Sequent to gain market share from the proprietary mini-makers, in the long term Logitek sees Motorola’s nearest competitors as Unisys, NCR and Bull. Logitek claims its expertise in selling Unix to a commercial market rests with the fact that it has 10,000 Altos systems up and running in that field. All of which leads to the question, exactly how happy is Altos about Logitek’s new chum Motorola? While Logitek itself concedes that there will be an overlap between the two suppliers’ ranges, it is confident that its Altos user base will move up to the new Altos machines when they are released next year. After all a move to Motorola for such users would entail buying completely new versions of software. Consequently, the only defectors are likely to be those users that require a far larger system than Altos can offer – possibly a much smaller number than Motorola might like. Nevertheless, Motorola is happy enough to pass the marketing of its products on to Logitek, since Logitek is more than capable of configuring Delta systems and offering support to a user base that it knows well. Logitek’s dealers, on the other hand, will find RISC an alien concept to peddle, therefore Logitek is entering into a RISC partnership with them. This entails providing back-up for marketing, sales, technical support and maintenance. In the UK the dealer shows will hit the user road soon under the slogan the greater the RISC the greater the Reward – probably not a catchphrase likely to make much headway with cautious financial directors….
