The upgrading of a telephone exchange in Tashkent has been completed by Alcatel SEL RFT, German division of Alcatel NV: the project was worth $340m and increased the capacity of the exchange to 4,000 from 3,000 lines.
Minister of Communications Vladimir Bulgak has announced the formal creation of Sviaz-Invest, which will be the recipient of the $1,000m proceeds from the part privatisation of the 86 state-owned telephone operators in Russia: this money will be invested in the 50X50 project – the huge Russian state public network investment plan.
A rare case of a Russian criminal prosecution for the illegal distribution of computer software was expected to go before a Moscow court during the summer: Moscow-based Fiztekhsoft is suing three of its former staff who set up their own firm, Paragon Technology System and started the sale of the Fiztekhsoft PTS-DOS Extended Operation System in Russia and abroad.
Moscow-based R-Style Investment Ltd has formed a software lab which will be responsible for the development of the RS-Bank and RS-Balance systems for banks and enterprises: it will also be the venue for the development of new business software; it will employ 180 to 200 people by the end of this year; software turnover in 1994 was $3.9m and the laboratory is earning between $400,000 to $500,000 per month at the moment; the company’s total turnover in 1994 was $102m.
ParaGraf-Interface – no relation to the Russian software company JV Paragraph – has won one of the largest ever contracts to deliver and install packaged software in the Russian Federation: the deal is for 5,000 licences of Symantec Corp and Microrosoft Corp products to be used by around 1,000 users at Incombank, a large Russian commercial bank; the company specialises in large state customers and has long term contracts to provide on-site support to customers such as the Presidential Council, The Presidential Administration, several state ministries, the state Duma and large industrial firms like Gasprom; according to chief executive Alla Poligenkaya, several other large contacts are in the pipeline.
Nearly all Russian cities on the Kola peninsula will have international telephone access via Norway, thanks to the efforts of Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor A/S, which has thus far invested $3.5m in the development of the communication infrastructure in the north-western regions of the Russian Federation: the company expects to spend a further $7m during the 1996 to 1997 financial year; digital exchanges have been installed in Murmansk and several other cities and negotiations have been started with local authorities in the Vologda and Karelia regions.
The Moscow division of the Russia Savings Bank, which turned to the Kuznetsov Applied Mechanics Institute, NII Prikladnoj Mekhaniki imeni Kuznetsova, in an attempt to develop its own models of teller machines, has so far tested 20 machines produced by the institute last year: the machines are not integrated into the new information processing and control systems planned for use at the Saving Bank.
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Scala CIS has released a new module for its bi-lingual accounting software, called Europayroll: the application was developed by a team of Russian developers, collaborating with Scala developers in Eastern and Central European countries.
The first Symantec Corp product for the Macintosh and Power Macintosh to be localised in Russia, Norton Utilities 3.1, has been released: the company worked with the Russian company Maximum on the translation.
As the Russian computer market grows, so companies are beginning to look beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union for new markets for their products, and in the vanguard of this exploration is Moscow-based Cognitive Technologies, a joint venture between Moscow-based software firm Bastion, which developed the Tiger-Rus Cyrillic alphabet recognition system, and US firm Cognitive Technology Corp, which has opened an office in a small city near Frankfurt am Main, Germany to sup
port its CuneiForm optical character recognition systems: the company is talking to Siemens AG, Primax Inc and Logitech SA about possible bundling deals.
Novell Inc said Russian sales during 1994 totalled $7.5m: in the first quarter, starting in November 1994, sales topped $5m, it said.
