AT&T Co is getting impatient to establish itself in the UK computer and has decided that growing its AT&T Istel Computer Systems Ltd from scratch will take too long. Accordingly, the company is looking around for acquisitions and has spent its first UKP2.5m buying Swindon, Wiltshire-based Unix systems house and systems integrator Daton Systems Ltd. Daton specialises in ICL and Bull HN systems, and it has in turn acquired WP Associates Ltd, which is a Bull and Philips value-added reseller. Daton does UKP3.5m a year and has 42 employees, and is still celebrating a UKP400,000 software development contract with the Ministry of Defence in partnership with ICL using the Informix relational database; a UKP250,000 ICL DRS installation at Dungeness Power Station; and UKP100,000 MS-DOS and Unix system for the Royal Air Force on Bull kit. WP does UKP1m of business a year building systems using Oracle and Dataflex databases and has 15 employees. A key product is an electoral administration package.
