Corky Siegel, who rejoices in all the top three titles at Harris Computer Systems Corp is to be president and chief executive of the combined company, which will be called Concurrent Computer Corp but headquartered in Fort Lauderdale with the legal and financial departments. Concurrent president and chief executive John Stihl gets the chairman’s job. The two firms are investigating a name change for the long term. Siegel reckoned savings in overhead, research and development and sales would mean the new company would be profitable in the first quarter. Concurrent has some 750 employees, with development teams in Oceanport; Westborough, Massachusetts; and Slough, Berkshire. Harris has 430-odd staff. The two said that they would eliminate overlap but declined to specify areas where cuts will be made. Concurrent is best known for its real-time and fault-tolerant simulation, weather, multimedia and gaming systems; Harris for its real-time secure technology. The new company says it will move to a single line of PowerPC systems running a Unix operating system blended from Concurrent’s RTU Real-Time Unix and Harris’s Secure/Power Unix. Concurrent, which had planned to launch PowerPC Maxion successors in 1996, said its customer contracts called for it to continue to support the MIPS-based line for at least 20 years. Harris said the combined company will maintain the arrangement under which it resells Compagnie des Machines Bull SA symmetric multiprocessing Escalas fitted with Secure/Power. The two claim their biggest competitors are not other real-time folk such as Encore Computer Corp but the likes of IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, and more recently Silicon Graphics Inc, which Concurrent notes is making in-roads into the real-time market without a dedicated real-time offering of its own.
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