IBM Corp’s Pennant Systems Inc printer company in Boulder, Colorado may depend on Hitachi Ltd for the core of its flagship product, the high-end 3900 non-impact printer, but its chief Jim Vanderslice comes over as much more his own man than the chiefs of most of IBM’s other decentralised units – and he has a clear vision of where he intends to take his company. His most important coup, unlike any of the others, was to insist that he needed his own sales force and his own maintenance operation the latter at a stroke turning Pennant into a $2,000m a year company rather than the $1,000m a year business it would have been sans maintenance. Vanderslice says that after the company has incorporated in all countries where it intends to operate a process to be complete by January 1, regulations say that it must remain a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM, but after that, he sees IBM divesting 60% of the equity, with some going to the employees of Pennant and the rest being publically traded, while IBM retains 40%. He acknowledges the debt to Hitachi, but is quick to point out that IBM demanded 400 engineering changes to the print engine. As to rounding out his product line with low-end printers that might compete with those from IBM spin-out Lexmark Systems Inc, he says he will enter the market when the non-compete clause runs out in 1996 – if it looks like good business.
