A huge cut-back in the operations of Framingham, Massachusetts clustering interconnect specialist Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc is due to be announced today. A Dolphin official would only confirm that there have been some organizational changes. This is believed to be a huge cull of senior management who have burned their way through more than $20m of backers money in a forlorn attempt to get the company’s technology accepted as clustering technology for NT servers. Dolphin’s technology has been used by Unix vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Data General Corp and Siemens Nixdorf, and the company is likely to continue to sell and support its Unix-based products. Back in May it renamed its SCI scalable coherent interface product line CluStar and got together a band of supporters, including IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Lockheed Martin, Novell Inc, Ing C Olivetti SpA and Scali Computer. Dell Computer Corp was also said to be evaluating the technology. Dolphin’s problems were undoubtedly increased by the long delays in the release of NT 5. Aging press releases and no job vacancies at Dolphin’s web site suggest it is a company with nowhere to go. Dolphin came from the now defunct Norwegian minicomputer maker Norsk Data, and its Oslo parent will still produce its hardware products. But the company signaled big ambitions in the US with the 1995 acquisition of the assets of Kendall Square Research, a company whose plans to develop a supercomputer led to liquidation. Kendall Square brought with it some interesting multiprocessor interconnect technology similar to Dolphin’s own. Never short of ambition, Dolphin boasted at the beginning of last year that it would double or triple revenues over the next two to three years (CI No 3,172). But it faced increasing competition, particularly from Tandem Computer Inc’s higher profile ServerNet clustering technology. In 1996, Dolphin bought BBN Corp’s Toolworks product line, used in parallel, multiprocessing, distributed and other high performance systems. The Dolphin Toolworks operation is unlikely to be affected by the reorganization.
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