In the first obvious move indicating that NCR Corp and its parent AT&T Co are actually moving closer together and could in fact someday become the entity IBM Corp always feared, NCR last week announced that Phil Neches, who came into the company with Teradata Corp and has responsibility for research and development and its product strategy, will become group technical officer of AT&T Multimedia Products and Services effective February. However, he retains his management responsibility over at NCR for growing its commercial enterprise solutions business. In his new role, Neches will be responsible for exploiting key multimedia technologies across AT&T’s business units. He will be working with the former chairman of Unix System Labs Bob Kavner who is now executive vice-president and chief executive of AT&T Multimedia Products & Services. Meanwhile, NCR was supposed to decide on Friday January 14 what its name was going to be. Its head of worldwide marketing Bill O’Shea told as we went to press that he didn’t know whether the final recommendation was going to be AT&T with a tag line or AT&T-NCR. The time might be right for NCR to go ahead and change its name. Having undergone a massive reorganisation, it has finally decided that the thing that it is still missing is marketing and some kind of profile in the industry. So, later this month it is to come out with a corporate positioning statement, followed up by all the press frills Regis McKenna can provide in BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes et al, and then a campaign aimed at vertical markets. Its problem has been attracting new customers – this so far has been down to word-of-mouth and superhuman sales efforts.
