AT&T Corp’s AT&T Global Information Solutions has won a ringing endorsement of its Intel-with-everything computer strategy from the South Korean government. Some three years ago, Seoul embarked on a strategy to establish a national computer architecture to be used throughout the public sector, and the first name that popped up in contention was that of Unisys Corp with its A-series, but Tandem Computers Inc and AT&T Global were also in contention. Last summer, Unisys was eliminated from the bidding (CI No 2,450), and yesterday, the trade ministry told Reuters that AT&T Global had beaten Tandem to the contract, to be announced at a formal signing ceremony today. The mission is to create a massively parallel server with throughput of 1T-bytes per second by the end of 1997. Of the locals, Hyundai Electronics Co has dropped out but Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Korea Computer Co are also involved in the project, budgeted at just under $50m, of which the government is to put up half in the form of soft loans. The planned machine will be derived from AT&T Global’s high-end 3600 multiprocessor, which is built of multiple Intel Corp Pentium microprocessors, and includes technology developed by the Teradata Corp acquisition. Under the deal, AT&T Global will provide South Korea with all technology necessary for the manufacture of the 3600, and the South Korean companies will have exclusive rights to sell and offer maintenance services on the machine on the domestic market, and rights to export it to about 30 other countries. The domestic market for such systems is put at $300m a year.
