After six months of jockeying for position and calling each other names, Concurrent Computer Corp, Oceanport, New Jersey is to acquire Harris Computer Systems Corp, Fort Lauderdale, Florida – and is moving to the PowerPC RISC from the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R-series in its Maxion real-time Unix multiprocessors. Until now, the only offer that had been made public was an offer from Harris of one of its own shares for every Concurrent out, back in March (CI No 2,614) – now Concurrent holders will get a rather larger piece of the combined pie, for it is paying 9.56 Concurrent common shares for each Harris share, resulting in Concurrent shareholders holding 61% of the combined companies. Both companies are old-time real-time mini manufacturers, and both have seen much better days: Harris yesterday reported a loss for the year to September 30 of $11m on sales down 22% at $45m. Concurrent reported a 1.9m first quarter loss on sales that plunged 36% to $26.5m. Harris is already moving to PowerPC from 88000 in its Night Hawk real-time Unix multiprocessors. Corky Siegel, who holds all the top three posts at Harris is to be president and chief executive of the combined company, which will be called Concurrent but headquartered in Fort Lauderdale with the legal and financial departments. He reckons savings in overhead, research and development and sales mean the new company will be profitable in the first quarter.
