One of the grand old names of the industry – but one that has decidedly seen better days – IPL Systems Inc – is to merge with San Diego-based Andataco Inc. The terms call for shareholders of Andataco to receive about three IPL shares for each Andataco they hold, which will make the principal shareholder of Andataco the controlling shareholder of the combined companies, if the letter of intent becomes definitive. IPL, now based in Maynard, Massachusetts, started out offering add-on memory and other plug- compatible peripherals for IBM Corp mainframes, and for a time even built its own IBM-compatible mid-range mainframes. Latterly it has concentrated on disk subsystem integration, particularly for the IBM RS/6000 Unix line, where it one time cheekily bought IBM-made disk drives OEM and integrated them into subsystems that were cheaper than IBM’s own offerings for the same market. Andataco manufactures RAID and non-RAID storage products featuring its intelligent ESP Enterprise Storage Packaging self- monitoring enclosure technology, and distributes products from other manufacturers through a US-wide network of sales offices. For a time it marketed the Liken Macintosh emulator for Unix systems running X Window. Separately, IPL warned it expects a fourth- quarter loss of $1m on sales of about $2.4m; it lost $380,000 on revenue of $7.0m in fourth quarter 1995.
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