DEC chairman and CEO Bob Palmer said yesterday the Intel Corp and Cabletron Corp agreements complete his strategic plan and that no more divestitures are planned. Indeed Palmer confirmed the company will begin looking for modest acquisitions in the software, services and storage areas (CI No 3,302). DEC will be sitting on a $3.2bn cash pile once the Intel and Cabletron deals close. DEC took time reiterate its claim that the Alpha [RISC chip] is not dead. The Intel Corp deal re-energizes it, the company said. With Intel’s process technology there’ll be an 0.18 micron Alpha chip on the market 12 to 18 months ahead of when we could have expected to deliver it, Palmer said. So why is it putting DEC Unix on Intel’s IA-64 Merced chip then? If and when Merced offers a performance advantage it’ll be a simple job to recompile applications from Alpha, it said. Palmer says the order book suggests there is some recovery in the Asia/Pacific markets as well as in Europe, where the UK is currently its strongest territory. Meantime, DEC says it has begun to reinvest in the development of its Alta Vista web search engine site following the canceling of its IPO plan for the unit. DEC says it is expanding the size of the index, adding a natural language front end and expects to provide a range of document translation services.
