The largest distributor of Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Unix in Russia, St Petersburg-based Olly, has won a contract with the Moscow Savings Bank to supply Intel Corp Pentium-based multiprocessor machines to 40 bank sites, along with 1,000 licences of SCO Unix: if Sberbank decides to take all of the machines it plans, the deal could be worth $4m to Olly; the computers are built using C-Bus II boards from Irvine, California-based Corollary Inc, which are designed for multiprocessors.
Unisys Corp will begin distributing personal computers in Russia: the commitment was made by James Unruh during a visit to Moscow; the Unisys Russian joint venture, Unimas, now has 200 staff; it won a $127m contract with Russian Savings Bank in 1994.
Microsoft Russia achieved sales equivalent to $12.1m in 1994-1995: the figure includes more than 300,000 licences, sales of which were 42% higher than last year; turnover in general was up 131% on 1993-4, with unit sales up 175%; included in sales were 20,000 copies of Microsoft Office and 6,000 copies of FoxPro; the company is also responsible for all of the markets of the former Soviet Union apart from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.
The Global Accounts section of Moscow-based integrator LVS Corp has sold a billing and customer care system to US West Inc for a cellular operation in Irkutsk: it is being converted to run on Oracle by LVS at its development centre; the company said the American carrier has already expressed an interest in buying two more systems this year and expects sales from at least three other operators.
St Petersburg-based A/O Svetlana, one of the largest electronic and computer equipment defence industry enterprises in Russia, has signed an agreement with German company Data Disc Robots to buy compact disk production lines: the contract is worth the equivalent of $8m; the project is backed by a consortium of Russian banks headed by the Promstroybank; a separate venture called Multimedia has been established at Svetalana to produce musical compact discs, video CD, CD-ROM and CD-I disks.
One of the oldest companies in the Western world, Helsinki, Finland-based Fiskars Oy, founded in 1649 and now selling everything from garden shears to advanced electronics, has opened a representative office in Moscow for its Power Systems Oy AB unit.
Intel Corp saw sales of $33m in the former Soviet Union during 1994: regional sales manager Steve Chase said Russia and other emerging markets will get preferential allocations of 80486 processors as the supply dwindles late this year, or early next.
Russia’s most successful seller of bookkeeping products, 1S, has released version 6.0 of its best selling product 1S Bukhgalteriya: the MS-DOS version is used at around 100,000 offices in Russia.
Moscow-based firms Mikroinform and Virtus will sell equipment from San Diego, California-based Solectek Corp for wireless communication equipment used to integrate computers in local area networks.
