Daisy Systems Corp was beginning to look as if it had no future at all when no buyer for the business appeared after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but Intergraph Corp has made an eleventh hour offer of $14m for the assets of the computer-aided engineering software developer. Intergraph signed a letter of intent to pay $10m in cash and $4m in shares, and entered a deposit of $1m, and the offer was due to be examined by the bankruptcy court in San Jose this week. It had been thought that Suez Partners of Paris would make a firm offer for the company, but Intergraph’s bid is seen as the most serious offer to date. The existence of the bid was turned up in court papers, and Intergraph declined to elaborate or say whether the bid was for all the assets, which consist of Daisy Systems in Sunnyvale, Cadnetix in Boulder, Colorado, and the design centre and European operations, which are headquartered in Israel. Although the move would take Integraph into electronic design automation in a big way, it raises key questions about the company’s future product strategy, because the Huntsville, Alabama firm builds all its worksta tions around its own Clipper RISC chip, and has committed to the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 Unix, while most of Daisy’s software is written for Sun Microsystems work stations – versions for the Sparc are almost ready – and Sun is a member of Unix International Inc.
