Waltham, Massachusetts-based Cambex Corp has finally opened for business in the UK, even though it still doesn’t have a physical UK office. Peter Waller, formerly managing director with Hitachi Data Systems UK Ltd, became European president at the beginning of the month and is currently looking for premises in the M25 orbit. Cambex will next open offices in Frankfurt, Germany and Paris, France where it will sell direct to the customer. In Spain and Italy it sell through partners. Joseph Kruy, chairman, president and chief executive, as well as founder of the company, was in London to launch the UK operation; he said Cambex had planned to be in the UK before now but the collapse of the mainframe market in 1992 meant it was in no financial position to make this move. At that time, even though it had started its diversification into Unix storage systems, this part of the business was too young and unable to make up the losses the company experienced. And so plans for an expansion into Europe had to be delayed until the company was on a firmer financial footing. But now Cambex said financial bad times are behind it: it is back in profit, albeit tiny, and Kruy reckons new products and the geographical expansion will lead to significant growth for the company, which would like very much to emulate the success of its close neighbour, EMC Corp. Cambex said its Unix disk arrays have been well received and it is ploughing ahead with their development and work on the Cascade Model H, which will be launched next quarter and offer disk storage for mixed mainframe and client-server environments. Kruy said users would be able to configure the Cascade Model H (probably not the name it will ship under) so that part of it was used by the mainframe, and the remainder by open syste ms. The actual split could be varied over time, to reflect a company’s gradual move to client-server systems. Although it bears the name of the company’s mainframe product, at its heart is the Centurion RAID array for Unix, the focus of much of the company’s current research. There is already a Centurion for Solaris and AIX, and within the next couple of months it will have a version for HP-UX; the company said it has not had one before because it has been waiting for HP-UX 10. There will also be a version for Windows NT. The company will continue to develop and sell its mainframe memory systems, however.
Content from our partners
