Gossip is swirling around Prime Computer Inc in the wake of disagreement among its financial backers, which are led by J H Whitney and include several major investment houses that were left holding Prime paper they had hoped to be able to sell on in the wake of the buyout of Prime. According to International Data Corp’s Euro TechTalk newsletter, reorganisation of the company is inevitable, and internal studies are under way to see whether divisions can be spun off as viable companies. One candidate is clearly the PrimeService business, which has been trying to build itself into a significant third party maintenance player: the core of the business is looking after Prime’s own customers, and it is now said to account for 44% of turnover. The Computervision subsidiary, still running at $900m a year, is clearly another candidate; less promising is the Pick-derived Prime Information business systems family.
