Digital Equipment Corp added the Celebris XL line of Pentium-based personal computers, replacing the DECpc XL series: the line comes in seven deskside models – three fully configured and four configured specifically for resellers – and come with single or dual 90MHz or 100MHz Pentiums; 64-bit graphics accelerators, PCI/AT subsystems and burst cache for increased performance; and upgrades to dual-Pentium and Alpha processors; an entry-level Celebris XL 590 single-processor system is $2,650 and a dual-processor Celebris XL 5100 costs $4,800.
Hewlett-Packard Co reveals that its huge TAC-4 US Navy contract has already swallowed up most of its Precision Architecture 7200-based HP 9000 system production capacity, for systems not even announced yet.
It’s so galling for those that migrate into systems integration when you have to procure from a third party a product category that your parent makes, but that is the fate of IBM Corp’s IBM Government Systems with its contract for the US Forest Service: it has had to go to the new King of Prussia, Pennsylvania based HDS Network Systems Inc for X Window terminals for the Forest Service’s geographic information system requirements US-wide – the former Human Designed Systems will supply up to 52,000 80960CA RISC-based colour X Window terminals to the Forest Service and US Department of Agriculture, depending on government funds available.
Nextel Communications Inc, Rutherford, New Jersey has revised the terms of its investment in Corporacion Mobilcom SA de CV of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, cutting its additional cash commitment to $15m from $107.5m by converting to equity a $42.5m loan previously made to Mobilcom and investing an added $10m; it plans to make an added $5m in January to give it about 18% of Mobilcom, and it won options to increase its ownership to about 40% over the next three years; Mobilecom holds equity interests in companies licensed to provide Specialised Mobile Radio services in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Acapulco, Tijuana and other areas; the two also agreed to a channel-sharing arrangement along the border between the US and Mexico to give Nextel additional capacity.
Data Broadcasting Corp has a letter of intent to sell most of the assets of its Shark Information Services Corp unit to Automatic Data Processing Inc, Roseland, New Jersey for about $18m in cash, plus the assumption of about $2m debt.
SunSoft Inc had planned to ship a Desktop Management Task Force-compliant agent with its mid-year Solaris 2.5 release, but the agent is not now expected to be ready before Solaris 2.6, expected early 1996.
Sun Microsystems Inc handed over the first Sparccenter 2000E to John Menzies Plc as part of a deal to provide the wholesale company with ú1m worth of Sparc workstations and servers; the total deal is worth ú2.3m and the system being installed will run a new executive information system at John Menzies which will be based on Oracle: the Sparccenter 2000E will run the head office database and collect information from the Sparcstation 10s that will be located at the 66 John Menzies branch offices and wholesale outlets; the Sparccenter was the first to roll of the production line at the newly expanded manufacturing plant in Linlithgow, Scotland; Sun is now producing its entire range of servers at the plant, which expanded at the start of this month and now serves the company’s customer base right across Europe.
Argyll Group Plc’s Safeways stores will be the first UK supermarkets to try handheld barcode scanning devices: the scanners will enable shoppers to scan bar-coded items directly into their baskets and therefore cut down on the time spent queuing to pay for goods; the self-scanners, known as Portable Personal Shoppers were developed by Symbol Technologies Inc (CI No 2,465) and pilot trials are to start in the middle of the month.
Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd has won government approval for a six-month commercial test of video-on-demand services, on condition that it open its n
etwork to any other company that wants to test video-on-demand services, maintain separate accounts and not cross-subsidise it from other operations.
IBM Corp has released the radiology vocabulary module for its VoiceType Dictation system: it was developed by IBM’s Hursley Lab, with specific vocabulary provided by the radiology department of Belfast City Hospital, Northern Ireland; this means that it is suitable only for UK-based radiologists; it costs ú500.
Northern Telecom Ltd reports $50m in orders from Chinese provincial organisations for exchange enhancements to support nearly 500,000 telephone lines in three areas: the contracters are the Yunnan Provincial Telecommunications Administration, the Jilin Provincial Telecommunications Administration and the Chongqing Telecommunications Bureau in the province of Sichaun.
Rockwell International Inc’s telecommunications arm has changed the name of the UK company to Rockwell Telecommunications Ltd and transferred Northern European headquarters to its Bracknell, Berkshire base; it had been based in Germany.
IBM Corp and its French software subsidiary CGI Informatique SA have an agreement whereby IBM Belgium will cede control of Belgian client-server tool maker Softcycle SA to CGI’s CGI Systems in Belgium: Softcycle specialises largely in insurance application development and maintenance, notably for the AS/400; the change gives CGI Systems a larger product offering in the Belgian and Luxembourg markets, particularly in the AS/400 segment.
Sony Corp, with the San Antonio, Texas plant it bought in 1990 from Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and the chip design centre it established in San Jose, is now ready to start selling chips in the US, and has formed Sony Semiconductor Co of America in San Jose for the purpose.
They are all queuing up to do it now – Austin, Texas-based CompuAdd Computer Corp has signed with Microsoft Corp for rights to install Windows95, replacing Windows For Workgroups 3.11 as CompuAdd’s primary operating system; Epson Corp also plans to pre-load Windows95.
Oracle France SA has won a contract to equip the 2,000-strong fleet of Paris’s taxis bleus with a digital management system, which will include on-board computers for real-time mobile data exchange: at the operations centre, a Unix server will process data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, assuring location of vehicles via satellite and the distribution of calls.
CompuAdd Computer Corp, Austin, Texas cut prices on its Escort line of notebook computer by up to 20%, with the 450 Colorscan with 50MHz 80486DX2 cut 20% to $1,925; the firm is also offering a Solidex Carrying Case or MiniDocking Station also can be purchased for only $1 more during the current month.
Birkenhead, Merseyside-based PhoneLink Plc and Expotel Hotel Reservations, a UK-based hotel booking agent, will launch Expo Tel-Me, a service that will enable subscribers to PhoneLink’s Tel-Me system to find hotel rooms from their personal computers: the service will run alongside the Tel-Me Automobile Association Travelogue, which has a database of British hotels; Expo Tel-Me should be ready when Tel-Me version 2 ships next quarter.
Informix Software France SA announced that retail distribution giant Docks de France, which boasts more than 1,000 stores in France and Spain, has chosen Informix OnLine for its inventory management system: the application has been installed in three pilot sites and will be extended to six more by the end of the year; it also announced two contracts in the banking sector in North Africa: one with the Moroccan Bank of Foreign Trade; and with the National Bank of Algeria.
Fujitsu Ltd says it plans to raise its production of thin-film transistor liquid crystal displays six-fold in fiscal 1996 starting next month: it is currently making 15,000 of the flat panels a month and will invest $333m at the desperately devalued exchange rate to get to 100,000 by March next year.
Prodigy Services Co is looking at e
xpanding its on-line service beyond the US: at the PC Forum conference it said it has interesting work going on in the international area but declined to be more specific.
Computervision Corp is in the final stages of negotiating a multi-year joint software development agreement with Daimler-Benz AG; under the agreement, the companies will develop advanced automated design offerings compatible with Pelorus-based applications developed by Computervision and other software developers; Computervision will contribute the latest information technology and advanced computer aided design funtionality to the partnership; no terms disclosed.
Swiss clockmaker Ste Suisse Microelectronique et d’Horlogerie is to collaborate with Siemens AG to develop miniaturised Swatch-based mobile telecommunications devices for consumers; in the initial phase Siemens will deliver devices based on its existing mobile and wireless phones but with a Swatch design.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB bought 49% of Croatian telephone equipment manufacturer Nikola Tesla, and won a contract worth $400m to $540m over five years for delivery of its AXE switching equipment to Croatia.
Microsoft Corp says it will ship more than 400,000 beta test copies of Windows95 worldwide: the copies will be sent largely to licensed business customers, with about one in three in Europe, Bernard Vergnes, Microsoft Europe chairman said.
Hewlett-Packard Co says its HP 9000 workstations will be the first non-IBM machines to run IBM Corp and Dassault Systemes SA’s Catia computer-aided design and manufacturing suite at the end of this month – but not for long, because Silicon Graphics Inc made a similar announcement, but giving no date.
The NEC Technologies Inc unit of NEC Corp has three new Versa P Series notebook computers, based on the Pentium with a 10.4 screen: the new notebooks will be available late this month in North America.
Compaq Computer Corp lowered US prices on 66 models of its top-selling 66 models of the Compaq Deskpro XL, Compaq Deskpro XE and Compaq ProLinea business desktop personal computers by up to 23% and added redesigned Deskpro and ProLinea models; every new Deskpro includes an integrated network interface controller and a set of desktop management tools, as well as features collectively called Intelligent Manageability; a new high-performance ProLinea 575 with a 75MHz Pentium four slots, four bays, 420Mb hard disk and 8Mb memory is $2,000; a new Deskpro 575 with the same configuration, but with Network Interface Controller and Intelligent Manageability built-in, sells for about $2,150.
Gandalf Technologies Inc shares rose about 14% Tuesday in very heavy trading on talk of a takeover and a major contract with IBM Corp.
AT&T Corp has chosen Hoofdorp, the Netherlands for the headquarters for its Uniworld joint venture with Unisource BV: We don’t have an extensive network in Europe and are preparing in the next five years to become the second largest network in every European country we choose to enter, Pier Carlo Falotti said; AT&T is already one of Europe’s biggest companies, Falotti said at Hannover, noting that sales were around $7,500m last year, and that it employs 27,000 people in Europe.
And AT&T Corp is interested in Belgacom NV’s international communications network, possibly in a deal via its Uniworld joint venture, butdoes not want to buy a stake in the Belgian telephone company, it said.
GEC-Plessey Telecommunications Ltd signed a contract worth $22.5m with state-owned China National Post & Telecommunications Appliance Co to install a Synchronous Digital Hierarchy link between Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and Shanghai.
DeTeMobil GmbH, the cellular unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, has signed an roaming agreement with GTE Corp.
The contract granted to Electronic Data Systems Corp to supply the UK Inland Revenue with information technology services will save the taxpayer an estimated ú225m cash: the ú1,033m 10-year deal won by
the General Motors Corp unit offered 17.5% savings compared with the projected in-house costs, a National Audit Office report asserted.
The Time Warner Communications unit of Time Warner Inc has chosen the Sybase Inc relational database as the foundation for its new telephony operations and its company-wide enterprise client-server information systems: Time Warner expects the contract to be worth several million dollars over the next three years in product and consulting services; using Sybase technology, Time Warner will create a system to run its new telephone operations based on the company’s existing cable franchises; the Sybase architecture will enable Time Warner to integrate data for cable services, telephone and business services, as well as serve as the basis for Time Warner’s Full Service Network, which will be providing multimedia consumer services.
The Polish operator Telbank has signed a $2m order with L M Ericsson Telefon AB to deliver Mobitex equipment for a pilot installation for the city of Warsaw and the surrounding area, including the airport: the system has been in operation since March 1; expansion plans include a nationwide network covering 90% of the Polish population of 40m within the next three years; proposed applications include point of sale, vehicle location and wireless electronic mail.
Storage Technology Corp completed takeover of Network Systems Corp.
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc has received preliminary court approval for settlement of the class action suit brought against it last year: shareholders in the class will share out $7.25m in new shares and $250,000 cash with the lawyers, along with the assignment of any claims it may have against its foromer accountant, Coopers & Lybrand.
Deutsche Telekom AG and PictureTel Corp signed a memorandum of understanding to embark on joint marketing of videoconferencing equipment.
Cable & Wireless Plc’s US unit said it started offering direct-dial phone service to Cuba: the move is a result of the US Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to remove calling restrictions between the US and the Caribbean country; Cable & Wireless said its customers will now be able to place calls to Cuba without operator help, making the calls cheaper.
Xyratex Ltd in Havant, Hampshire has turned itself into a remarkable company since its estimated ú50m buyout from IBM UK Ltd: according to an Evening Standard piece on venture capital, although IBM still takes about 80% of output, currently, 40% of annual sales are to non-IBM buyers, still it is vital for the firm to reduce its dependence on IBM – yes indeed…
