Elbit Ltd, Haifa, Israel is considering spinning off its defence and health care operations and becoming a pure commercial electronics play embracing its data communications, video products and systems for industrial applications; communication will be the primary focus of the company, and includes Fibronics Ltd and Elbit’s telephony and multimedia activities; the industrial activity includes Elbit Vision Systems Ltd and Inframetrics Inc; overall sales of the commercial businesses in 1995 are expected to be approximately $120m, Elbit said.
Oracle Corp, Redwood Shores, California, has reached a new TPC-C high, hitting 11,456 tpmC at $286 per tpmC on an eight-way Digital Equipment Corp AlphaServer 8400.
Object Design Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts will install its ObjectStore 4.0 object database in Nomura Securities Co Ltd’s fully-integrated front-, middle-, and back-office trading system in Europe: the ObjectStore database will serve as a front-end persistent cache to provide 300 Nomura share and bond traders with real-time reference data.
Israeli Internet firewall security company CheckPoint Software Technologies Ltd has sold a 20% tranche of stock to Venrock Associates and US Venture Partners which now hold 10% each; CheckPoint’s initial investor, BRM Technologies Ltd of Jerusalem, Israel has 30% and no additional capital was raised in the process; market researcher The Yankee Group believes that the firewall market will grow to $924m in 1999, up from $121m in 1995.
Iona Technologies Ltd of Dublin, Eire has appointed two new Orbix resellers this month: Malmo, Sweden-based Enea Data AB for Scandinavia; Japanese company Toyo Information Systems for the Pacific Rim.
Following San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems Inc’s acquisition of Grand Junction Networks Inc in October, it has rebranded its new unit’s product range so that the FastSwitch 10/1000, 2100 and 2800 become the Catalyst 1700, 2100 and 2800 respectively while Grand Junction’s FastHub 100 VL, Lite, TX, FX and T/FX are now unified under the FastHub banner, and they are henceforth to be known as the FastHub 104T, 108T, 116T, 112F and 116C.
The domestic data communications arm of Telefonica de Espana SA is now to be fully integrated into Unisource NV: the agreement to integrate Telematica, which employs around 200 people, completes the joining of Telefonica as a shareholder of Unisource; no financial details of the deal were given.
Taligent Inc’s last chapter is hung up with the lawyers but insiders expect few material differences from what has been published.
It’s a bit like an optical cable maker measuring its success by the number of strands rather than the number of cables it has shipped, or Mr Heinz counting the total number of beans rather than the number of cans he has sold this year, but Mountain View, California-based Allied Telesyn International Inc announced that its hub sales have exceeded 1m unshielded twisted pair Ethernet ports so far this year.
Siemens AG expects to have up to 40,000 employees in China by the end of the decade, chairman Heinrich von Pierer told Wochenpost.
Burlington, Massachusetts-based Xylogics Inc is now shipping the Remote Access 6100 channelised T1 remote access server and Nautica line of remote access bridge-routers for ISDN and leased line nets, which it introduced in October.
Alcatel-Alsthom SA’s Alcatel Submarine Networks unit has been awarded two contracts, totalling $33m, to supply and install an undersea telecommunications network between Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon: the first is for a 475-mile repeatered link between Alexandria in Egypt and Tartous in Syria, and was awarded by the Arab republic of Egypt Telecommunications Establishment and the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, and the system will operate at 2.5Gbps over two fibre pairs; the second project will link Saida, Beruit and Tripoli in the Lebanon to Tartous, and was awarded by the Syrians and the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications of the
Lebanon; the 106-mile link will run at 622Mbps over two fibre pairs.
In its new order, AT&T Corp has promoted Bill Eisenman to take overall charge of computer system design, development and manufacturing as senior vice-president at the Computer Systems Group: he replaces Tom Mays, most recently vice-president for Global Remote Services and the NCR veteran responsible for integrating the Teradata Corp acquisition into Global Information Solutions (hope that truly ghastly name does not survive the spin-off); Eisenman also gets on chairman Robert Allen’s leadership team.
Peking now has a telephone exchange capacity of 3.73m lines, and 1.5m phone subscribers, which was originally its target for the year 2000, according to the BBC Monitoring Service: it has a long-distance direct telephone network of more than 99,000 lines and 270,000 lines of cellular telephone capacity; the authorities now expect that telephone exchange capacity to top 7m lines by the end of the century, connecting 42% of the population.
We liked the note at the end of the US release of Learmonth & Burchett Management Systems Plc’s interim results, which says that the primary differences between accounting principles generally accepted in the United States and the United Kingdom relate to the accounting for the acquisition of Corporate Computing Inc, timing of recognition of licence and maintenance revenue, presentation of discontinued operations and restructuring charges and accounting for income taxes – which in other words seems to be saying that the same set of figures drawn up to the two accounting conventions will bear almost no relation at all to each other.
