Following outright acquisition of the US firm, London’s Root Computers Ltd is to merge its operations with associated company Unisoft Corp of Emeryville, California in a move intended to increase its effectiveness as an international company. Root previously owned 60% of Unisoft and had representation on the board, but the separate sales organisations were not co ordinated. New chief executive Jeremy Thomas, appointed in October, says that over the next few months the minority shareholders will be selling to Root, and that a whole set of structures will be put into place to merge the operations, which also include offices in Munich, Tokyo, and Boston. The Unisoft name will be retained, says Thomas, as the North American market represents the most significant area of future growth. Unisoft Corp has been in the news recently due to its involvement in the implementation of Unix for the Apple Macintosh II – according to Thomas, the A/UX operating system, complete with a great deal of Apple added value, will be available (a bit late) early next year – and the US company has also instigated moves to establish a binary portability standard for all Unix implementations on the Motorola 68030 processor. In the UK, Root this year launched UniTecs, a CICS emulator and transaction processing system that resulted from earlier work migrating Hoskyns mainframe software onto Unix systems: the product appeared for the first time in the US last month at Unix Expo. Thomas says the new company will allow a more efficient international dissemination of such products as well as providing unified worldwide support for large customers. He also revealed that the three current divisions of Root UK – Office, Technical and Business Systems divisions – will be re-united. They have done their job. We now have a set of office utilities and transaction processing software alongside Uniplus+ Unix and systems software. Our job is now to integrate those products. Thomas says that Unisoft will be involved in selected large-scale turnkey projects in the near future, and that it is looking to make acquisitions – the responsibility of chairman David Saunderson.
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