A joint venture company of Mitsubishi Electric Corp and IBM Japan Ltd, AST Co – no connection with AST Research Inc, has made moves to improve its standing in the open systems world, with the opening last month of an Open Systems Technology Centre, which will be a showcase for its multivendor and systems integration strategy. The centre will have a number of machines such as IBM RS/6000, AS/400 and PS/55 linked to Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co workstations under Ethernet, and then to personal computers such as the top-selling NEC Corp 9800 under a Token Ring network. AST now earns 7% of its revenue from open systems business, but is hoping to expand this to 30% over the next three years.
