After more than a year of promising a Moscow digital overlay network, Kalita, the operator of a cable television network in Kaliningrad, says it has reached a five year agreement with First Pacific Networks Inc to buy Pacific’s FRN1000i network management system which Kalita will use along with a fibre-coaxial network: Kalita intends to provide digital telephony to some 300,000 business and residential subscribers in the Moscow region by the end of the decade but a source in the company said the initial order is only for enough equipment to support about 300 telephones.
Intel Corp and Moscow-based maintenance services company Technoserv have signed an agreement making the Muscovite responsible for the servicing of all Intel personal computers in Russia: Intel notes that it chose Technoserv because of its experience in this area and its network of repair locations.
IVK has now started production of Pentium-based personal computers at its Kvant plant: IVK hopes to be able to price the machines at less than $2,000.
Blenheim International has bought WP International, organiser of the Windows Expo shows, creating a well-financed competitor to Comtek International which currently runs Comtek, the biggest annual computer show in Russia.
Russia’s largest vendors of notebook computers, Beli Veter, Kami, Trio+, Croc, Lamport Co Ltd, RUI IMC Apple Computer Inc and Smart Corp have formed a guild to combat the growing grey imports market: members of the guild sell around two thirds of all notebooks sold in Russia and machines sold by the members will be marked with a special guild sign.
IBM Corp’s Moscow division has set up a Merva user group for the 40 banks which have now bought the Merva Swift interface for getting onto the international network from IBM: chairman is head of the Swift department at the Stolichny bank, Y Dolbenko.
Microsoft Corp has ended the practice of quoting a recommended retail price for its products and now quotes only distributor prices: it also abolished the price disparity between Macintosh and Windows Russian products and both versions are now fsold at similar prices: the MS-DOS ‘amnesty’, which allowed illegal users of MS-DOS to buy a legal copy at the upgrade price, ran out at the end of last year.
Informatic, developer of the Orfo spell checker and thesaurus, has signed a licence agreement with Microsoft Corp and the Russian version of Word 6.0 for Windows now includes the Russian Thesaurus from Orfo; the thesaurus took three years of work to create and contains 60,000 antonyms and derivations.
Cognitive Technologies has released a version of its text recognition product called CuneiForm 1.3 for Windows, which enables text to be scanned into Microsoft Corp Word 6.0 for Windows without the need of a keyboard: it has also signed an agreement under which Hewlett-Packard Co will bundle CunieForm with all the scanners it sells in Russia.
