Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Europe, Middle East and Africa division has been discussing its best-ever first half and reviewing its future, with president and chief executive Lars Turndal denying that it is talking to SunSoft Inc. Bernard Hulme, vice-president and local managing director, said the division’s revenues were up 11% in the second quarter, 18% in the first half. Both Hulme and Turndal stressed the company’s role as a Unix server supplier, rather than a low-end supplier of networked personal computers. Hulme noted that it shipped 15,000 servers in France alone in 1993, worth some $300m. Said Turndal, Networked PCs is not the market we’re focusing on; we sell some there, but we’re stronger in Unix servers. Novell is strongly positioned [in networking]. I really don’t know what it is that they fear from Microsoft.

Census

Furthermore, said Hulme, Santa Cruz clients are not all small systems, as is sometimes believed. European users include the Norwegian Census Department, with 1,500 users on a pair of Compaq Computer Corp servers. There are over 100 users on a server at Sipa Press in France. As for other alliances or agreements, Turndal said, We’re not porting to the PowerPC today. Until I know that they’ve shipped 5m or 6m units, it’s not of interest to us. They are calling us up every week to tell us what an interesting market it is, but we have to wait and see because there’s the PowerPC, Alpha and Hewlett-Packard’s RISC and the marketplace has to make up its mind. He added that Santa Cruz still has a RISC operating system sitting on the shelf from its days with the ACE consortium, and so wouldn’t be caught off guard if the day comes that the market requires it. Turndal said the AT&T Global contract represents part of the company’s strategy to grow into the part of the Unix market that is held by AT&T Global, Unisys and ICL. He also indicated that the company is working with ICL on some kind of agreement. Hulme said the company is working tiatives in the area of global mobile access devices. The issue is getting these mobile devices synch-ed with the corporate computing backbone. We will make sure that we’re playing in that game, he said. Wall Street keeps asking what it intends to do with its $100m in cash, Turndal said. It’s very tempting to buy companies here and there, but they have to fit with our business. I’m very concerned with what to buy and when. Buying companies with extra cash is not necessarily a smart move.