IBM Corp has won a facilities management plus agreement with Public Service Co of Colorado: as well as IBM taking over operation of the electricity generator’s computer and phone systems, the two will seek to sell energy management expertise to other utilities and big customers: IBM said the facilities side of the agreement will yield about $500m in revenue over 10 years while saving Public Service about $190m; under the agreement to sell expertise to other utilities, IBM and Public Service hope to tap into the growing market for energy management, in which businesses and consumers are offered lower rates if they agree to curtail their electricity use during peak hours, using computers and IBM’s US-wide communications network to link customers with utilities, who could then remotely manage the use of high-consumption devices, such as air conditioners – Americans pay much higher electricity bills in the summer than they do in winter.
NEC Corp says it is to become an Internet access provider for Japanese firms later this month; NEC will initially set up 11 access points across Japan to connect corporate networks with Internet through high-speed leased lines or existing telephone lines; NEC will also help companies supply their own information through Internet by leasing or operating servers; it sees total sales from the new Internet business of $20m over the next three years, and expects to acquire 1,000 corporate customers.
Hitachi Ltd, which makes the chip used in the thing, says it intends to market a version of Sega Enterprises Ltd’s Saturn games machine.
Pacific Telesis Group Inc is asking the US Department of Justice to support a waiver to allow it to carry long-distance calls within California and from California to points out of state and to carry 800 calls terminating in California: the request see Pacific Bell enter the long distance business at the same time local phone service is opened to full competition.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, at the receiving end of a suit from Nintendo of America Inc alleging that since it fabricated games cartridges for alleged counterfeiters, it was responsible for counterfeit production, is counter-suing for damage to its image; it asserts that it has no way of knowing whether the code it embeds into ROM is legitimate or counterfeit and that Nintendo’s quarrel is with the designers, and not with Samsung.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd has licensed AT&T Corp’s Voice-Span technology developed by Paradyne which enables transmission of data and speech simultaneously on an analogue phone line at 12Kbps.
Compaq Computer Corp forecasts that its Asian-Pacific sales this year will top $1,000m for the first time, the Wall Street Journal reported: the Singapore unit said regional revenue last year grew 57%, unit sales jumped 73%, and it became the largest personal computer company for the first time in Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, and stays on top in Singapore.
Hungarian Telephone & Cable Corp has acquired telephone concessions for three additional primary districts in Hungary – Papa, Bekescaba and Oroshaza – total population 478,000, thus increasing the company’s coverage to 703,000: it has secured the acquisition by issuing 1m common shares and 200,000 warrants to purchase common shares at $20 a share; the company says more than 220,000 lines will be installed in the areas it covers for a total of 280,000 lines in service.
Novell Inc is shipping WordPerfect 6.0c for MS-DOS, an interim release of the Windows version for those with the courage to resist all blandishments and fashion and assert that can’t abide a morass of slow and turgid graphical software between them and their application.
LDDS Communications Inc’s WilTel Network Services has signed an agreement with Mexican systems integrator Intersys to provide the first public Frame Relay network in Mexico: Intersys will interconnect its customers’ high speed Frame Relay data traffic with WilTel’s WilPak Frame Relay network which wil
l then carry the data to cities throughout the US and overseas.
MCI Communications Corp is planning a virtual high-speed commercial telecommunications network across the US that combines Synchronous Optical Network and Asynchronous Transfer Mode technologies: MCI says the network will be capable of combining speech data and video transmissions over the same channel simultaneously at 155Mbps, with plans to boost transmission speed to 10Gbps in early 1996 and 40Gbps soon after that following introduction of fibre optic technologies.
A unit of Legend Holdings Ltd has been appointed exclusive retail dealer for AST Research Inc notebook computers in Hong Kong.
Dell Computer Corp has cut prices by up to 16%, or $400 to $700, on its Latitude XP family of notebooks and introduced a high-end model, the new Latitude 475C, with prices starting at $2,300: Dell plans to expand availability of Latitude XP notebooks worldwide; it also introduced disk and memory upgrade options for Latitude and Latitude XP.
The Syrian Interior Ministry has issued a tender for a radio communications, telephone and paging system – but don’t imagine that the poor humble Arab in the street will benefit: the system is to be used by one of the ministry’s security units; closing date is March 18.
Telrad Telecommunication & Electronic Industries Ltd of Israel has granted Northern Telecom Ltd an option to buy a 20% stake in the company for $45m: the option can be exercised until the end of 1996; Telrad, part of Koor Industries, is a telecommunications equipment manufacturer with revenues of $315m a year; in the past four years it has raised exports to $155m from $30m.
Time Warner Inc is to buy the cable television businesses of Houston Industries Inc in a deal valued at $2,200m: it will pay 1m shares of common and 11m shares of newly issued preferred stock for Kblcom Inc which has nearly 700,000 subscribers in Texas, Minnesota, Oregon and California; by issuing stock Time Warner avoids enlarging its debt load of $15,000m; it will also buy the other 50% of a joint venture it owns with Kblcom, Paragon Communications, which has 1m cable subscribers in Florida, New York City and elsewhere; the move, combined with the pending acquisition of cable systems from Summit Communications Inc and a joint venture with Newhouse Broadcasting Corp, will give Time Warner 10m cable subscribers, putting it just behind US market leader Tele-Communications Inc, which has 11m subscribers; it aims to build a local telephone business on its subscriber base.
Rosemont, Illinois-based Comdisco Inc has repurchased 1.1m shares of its common stock for $26m from the estate of founder Kenneth Pontikes, who died in June, and from related trusts: its subsidiary, Computer Discount Corp, paid $23.625 a share; Comdisco now has about 35.2m shares outstanding and the Pontikes estate and related entities have 8.1m or 23% of the common shares.
A former treasurer and vice-president of Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc has been charged with securities fraud over an alleged scheme to inflate Kurzweil revenues artificially: Debra Murray, the former treasurer and others are alleged to have recorded sales where the order had not been finalised or product had not been shipped, said the Boston US attorney’s office.
Fibercorp Inc’s Delray Beach, Florida-based Fibercorp International Inc will not now buy Jacksonville, Florida-based Communications Technology Cos Inc, and it has lost its president, who left citing differences in management styles: Fibercorp International offers transmission and power management systems for telecommunication networks.
GTE Corp’s GTE Personal Communications Services unit has turned to IBM Corp and the IBM Global Network to provide US cellular telephone users wireless access to a full range of networking applications and value-added telecommunications services previously available only over wired connections: services will include electronic mail, Electronic Data Interchange, Internet s
ervices, enhanced voice services and access to content from information providers; GTE will also market some IBM Global Network services to its existing and prospective mobile data customers and IBM will package its software and applications with notebook computers and network services for major corporations for activities such as field service and repair, transport, mobile sales forces, temporary offices and retail transaction processing.
NEC Corp is to raise output of 4M-bit memory chips worldwide to 13m a month from 12m a month by March, and of 16M parts to 7m a month from 3m a month by the end of the year; the efforts to produce 13m 4Ms a month will have to depend on getting a higher yield of good chips from each production run, since capacity is already very stretched.
Javaid Aziz, general manager of IBM UK Ltd, resigned abruptly on Tuesday night after a board meeting of IBM Europe: Aziz was said to be leaving for personal reasons and will be replaced by Barrie Morgans, head of the UK services business, and while one report says he already has another post to go to, other reports suggest that he was unhappy with the change in responsibilities that will follow the company’s new worldwide structure.
Ashok Leyland Pte Ltd and HCL Corp Ltd have teamed with Singapore Telecom Ltd to bid to offer basic and cellular telephone services in India: Ashok Leyland, part of London-based Hinduja group, is India’s second biggest truck maker, HCL is Hewlett-Packard Co’s Indian ally.
Fujitsu Ltd says it will have shipped 500,000 personal computers for the Japanese market by the end of the current fiscal year on March 31 and it expects to increase its overseas sales next fiscal year in co-operation with overseas partners ICL Plc, in which it has an 85% stake, and Amdahl Corp, where it has a 45% stake: currently, Amdahl doesn’t sell personal computers; Fujitsu hopes to double its domestic personal computer sales, to 1m boxes by the end of fiscal 1996.
British Telecommunications Plc has finally received approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for BT North America to resell private telephone lines connected to the public network in the UK, the US and Canada so that the Concert joint venture with MCI Communications Corp can offer virtual private networks to multinational companies from which employees will be able to dial end to end to any other destination in the countries served; the Concert venture already offers these services in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.
The new rules also enable British Telecommunications Plc to lease line capacity and deliver calls end-to-end between the UK and the US: AT&T Corp has similar end-to-end rights and in making the ruling, the Federal Communications Commission said the moves would increase competition, cut telephone costs between the two countries and help lower international accounting rates; British Telecom agreed to reduce its accounting rates towards a cost-based level over the next two years, which should lead to an upsurge of continental traffic crossing the Atlantic via London and putting the dinosaur state monopolies at a big disadvantage.
Hewlett-Packard Co is recalling 10,000 of its hot new HP OfficeJet printer-facsimile-copiers in the US and Canada because of a power supply defect that could cause a shock: the recalled OfficeJets are the model number C2890A, sold in the US and Canada, and has a 10-digit serial number with the tags US4B1 to US4B9, US4C1 to US4C9, US4BA to US4BU and US4CA to US4CK.
MFS Communications Co Inc, Omaha, Nebraska reports that its Swedish subsidiary MFS Communications AB has been granted a licence to provide international and domestic switched and private line telecommunications services to business and government customers; MFS plans to begin building a Stockholm network within the month and expects to be offering services to by June.
IBM Corp has joined the big round of price-cutting on portable computers, reducing t
ags on four of its ThinkPads, the 755C, 755CS, 360C and 360CE by $200 to $1,200 or between 5% and 24%; the 755C is now $3,500, the 755CS is $2,900, the 360CE is $2,800 and the bottom-of-the-line 360C now goes for $2,300.
US Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Larry Pressler has now drawn up a new telecommunications deregulation bill and predicts that legislation will be enacted this half: the new bill would give customers freedom to choose among competing firms offering local phone service, including cable television operators, freedom to choose among cable services, including phone companies in competition with traditional cable firms, and freedom to choose electric utility firms to provide telephone, cable or similar services.
Packard Bell Electronics Inc has applied to the authorities for a redundancy order for 95 warehouse and manufacturing employees at its Wijchen plant earlier than planned because of the Dutch flooding: Packard Bell production is split between Wijchen, near Nijmegen in the flood-affected east of the Netherlands, and Angers in France; the Wijchen workforce will fall to 175; We’d hoped to make a more gradual transition, but the current natural disaster has forced the issue, European vice-president of operations Wim Giezenaar commented; technical support will stay in Wijchen and is expected to grow significantly by the end of next year, creating 150 new jobs, and the headquarters function, including finance sales and administration will also stay in the Netherlands.
Even more insulting than last time around, Veba AG was able to take its stake in Cable & Wireless Plc to the planned 10% by buying 5.5% in the market yesterday at a mere 384 pence a share: it paid 395 pence a share for the first 4.5% and it had been prepared to pay up to 435 pence a share for the stake.
Some 2m of the 5.6m personal computers shipped in the US last quarter were for the home, Dataquest reckons: it says home sales took 31.7% of the US market in 1994, up from 28.6% in the previous year.
Rexon Inc has completed its relocation from California to Solon, Ohio: the new headquarters is at the campus of Rexon’s Tecmar unit.
Ever gone around the office late at night turning off machines others had left burning away the phosphors from the screen – and been driven mad trying to find the on-off switch on each unfamiliar machine? If you have, IBM Corp chief Louis Gerstner sympathises: The industry has got to spend more time, more research on simple things like ease of use, he says – I have eight IBM computers in my office in New York and every one of them turns on differently, boots up differently; he likens this to having three cars in one’s garage, each with the clutch and steering wheel in different places – formula for a crash.
