Laurent Gharda, currently vice president of marketing for Award Software International Inc, which last week agreed to merge with Phoenix Technologies Inc (CI No 3,391), says it’s not the case that the combination will create anti-trust issues in the PC BIOS market. Estimates have suggested that Award and Phoenix together will have up to 70% of the desktop BIOS market. But Gharda says there are many other competitors in the market, including Acer Labs, Ameican Megatrends Inc, which is strong in desktops and motherboards, SystemSoft Inc, which has concentrated on the notebook market, and IBM Corp, which has an agreement with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Even Intel Corp, which last year switched to Phoenix as the main supplier of its BIOS for its motherboards and which has a 6% stake (CI No 3,161), still ships the original BIOS it adapted from the American Megatrends product on many of its older boards. In fact, points out Gharda, the biggest competition still comes from proprietary BIOS implementations from the likes of Compaq Computer Corp, IBM, Dell Computer Corp and Toshiba Corp, which between them are responsible for the BIOS bundled in with around 30m or so systems annually. We are being attacked on all sides says Gharda, who points out that Microsoft Corp is forever trying to include more of the BIOS functionality within the operating system, while Intel does the same from the other direction via its chipsets. One of the primary reasons for the merger was the looming problem of Intel’s 64-bit Merced processor, which is going to entail a re-implementation of the BIOS from scratch. Phoenix has had lots of engineers working at Intel for some time as a definition partner on Merced, while Award was faced with a similar effort to do essentially the same task. They will now leverage the research and development effort. On the BIOS side, the two companies will maintain separate product lines until Merced, but will combine their embedded systems efforts. These include adding PC peripheral interfaces to non-PCs to support such things as 1394 Firewire and USB devices. Gharda says that there will be no lay-offs in engineering, sales and marketing, though some administrative positions may be lost.
