L M Ericsson Telefon AB is in talks with Hewlett-Packard Co on the formation of a joint venture in the area of telecommunications network management and control according to Swedish sources whose information has not been denied by the protagonists. They talk of significant investment in a company that would start life with over 500 employees. Hewlett-Packard has raised the status of its Telecommunication Network Operation in Grenoble, France to that of business unit: it oversees operations in Cupertino and Singapore as well as at French headquarters. With a relatively tiny home market, Ericsson is always short of the resources it needs to stay at the leading edge of its chosen industry, where the cost of major development projects is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, and although it has developed its own TMOS Telecommunications Management and Operations Support software suite – which runs under Unix, it needs the muscle of a company like Hewlett-Packard to exploit the product. It initially recommended Sun Microsystems Inc workstations to run it, and also has an agreement with Stratus Computer Inc under which it is marketed under the Stratus FTX fault-tolerant Unix (CI No 1,354, 1,423). Stratus of course has switched to Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture for future generations of its fault-tolerant RISC machines.
