Solbourne Computer Corp, Longmont, Colorado says it has two big OEM deals lined up with, as yet, undisclosed companies, through which it hopes to establish a significant market presence. At present, Solbourne is the only company with Sparc-based machines on the market apart from Sun. But waiting in the wings are six or seven companies working furiously to get a piece of the Sparc action. Toshiba is thought to be leading the pack with machines likely for early next year. In this light, Sun and Solbourne’s efforts must be determined attempts to grab as much market share as possible before rival companies’ efforts come out of the labs and into the shops. Solbourne has had Sparc systems out since January, and is now reckoned to have around 330 applications available on its range, compared with the 600 or so that now run on Sun workstations. The company reckons to have sold several hundred machines in the US according to president Douglas MacGregor, and has five or six customers in the UK, but none on the continent as yet. MacGregor says that the new 33MHz Sparc-based Series 5 workstations, revealed here a couple of weeks ago, which start with a UKP25,000 tag in the UK, will rival MIPS Computer Systems’ M/2000 workstation in performance – a claim he says will be backed up by SPEC benchmark results, to be published as soon as they are completed. Solbourne has taken a licence for the benchmarks, though it is not actually a member of the performance evaluation group which published its first results last month. Production of the Series 4 workstations will continue for the time being according to MacGregor. Both Sun and Solbourne have committed themselves to adopting Unix V.4 (they currently run the SunOS Unixalike operating system) and migration work is to be undertaken by Sparc International, the Sparc processors supporters club. Solbourne UK Ltd is based in Swindon, Wiltshire, and will have 20 staff by the end of 1989. Managing director Barrie Murray-Upton says there are a couple of distribution deals under discussion to get Solbourne onto the continent, and in Japan, Solbourne’s major shareholder, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, plans to begin marketing the boxes from December.
