Data communications company Millhouse Ltd, based in East Tisted in Hampshire has secured UKP500,000 of additional equity and loan financing from venture capitalist Investors in Industry (3i) to finance expansion of its business. Millhouse has been in existence in the protocol conversion market since 1971, but was relaunched in its new dynamic guise last year when its current managing director Bill Joss joined the management team from Thorn EMI Datatech, where he was sales and marketing director. Aside from the data communications business, the company is also an Apricot and Honeywell dealer. Millhouse is targetting a turnover of UKP3m in the present financial year, increasing to UKP8m next year. The source of this optimism lies with Millhouse’s Linguist family of communications devices which operate in a multi-vendor environment. The protocol converters are built around the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors, and use Millhouse’s own M2 operating system. They sit on or near the customer’s mainframe, conform to OSI Level 4, and, as well as converting asynchronous protocols, they are also able to deal with ICL’s CO3 and OSLAN, IBM’s SNA, Unisys (both Burroughs and Sperry) including UTS20, Bull’s protocols and TCP/IP, NetBIOS, Ethernet and X25. Price depends on the number of protocols the box is required to convert. Current customers include Heinz, Scottish Amicable, and British Gas West Midland, which has three Linguist boxes sitting near an ICL mainframe and communicating between OSLAN and 1500 peripherals using CO3. Millhouse believes that it will take at least 15 years for OSI to take over the world of computing, and, in the meantime, it intends to make hay with Linguist which is billed as instant OSI.
