Fujitsu Ltd’s Hal Computer Systems unit is withdrawing from the general-purpose workstation market after what it admits has been a sales and marketing disaster since it introduced its Sparc64-based workstations in October last year (CI No 2,793) It is currently being divided into separate divisions by new president and chief executive Yoshiro Yoshioka. The Fujitsu executive – also chairman of the Hal board – replaced former president and chief executive Scott Metcalfe and executive vice-president Art Goldberg last month. Hal says it will relaunch the company and re-position its 64-bit Sparc V9 architecture-compatible product line at the Design Automation Show in Las Vegas next month. It’s not clear whether there will be any lay-offs at the 500-person Campbell, California-based concern, but it is also expected to reveal a plan to get into profit. The company admits that it has sold just a few hundred HalStations since their introduction – which was two years late – and is set to reposition the 100MHz Model 330 and 118MHz Model 350 for specialist mechanical and electronic design markets as well as Web-serving. It is beefing up the high-end model with 3Gb memory as the Model 353. Servers are not expected this year. Hal has got more than 100 engineers working on its 64-bit Sparc64 CPU. The microprocessor group has funds enough for the rest of this year and will apparently remain unaffected by the changes. It says it has got four projects under way, including the promised Sparc64+ and third-generation versions. Its Fujitsu cousin, ICL Plc, is already selling HalStations into niche markets in Europe. ICL has got Metrologie International SA as a master distributor as its own Technology Plc unit was apparently after pressure from Sun Microsystems Inc, whose systems it resells.
