STC Plc’s agreed acquisition of Northern Telecom’s UK manufacturing and marketing operations, and data systems in several European companies – for UKP35m according to STC, UKP40m according to Northern Telecom, represents a tidying up of the relationship between STC and its 27.8% shareholder, but leaves some very uneasy product mixes. ICL, which has pretty much had the Northern Telecom Vienna multi-microprocessor Xenix and MS-DOS system dumped on it, has some careful calculations to make before it decides whether to adapt the product to fit into its DRS line or simply abandon it and try to move users over to the DRS 300 system – which runs Unix and Digital Research’s Concurrent DOS. As well as the French, Italian, Swiss and Benelux computer marketing operations, ICL will get the business in West Germany as well, but that has still to be unravelled. In Germany, Northern Telecom has a single company selling both telecommunications equipment and computers, and that has to be unravelled. On the people front, STC and ICL will together take on about 850 employees, 500 of them in the UK, the rest scattered around the continent. STC takes over only the UK marketing of Northern Telecom’s switching and transmission equipment, and the Mississauga, Ontario company fervently hopes that STC will be more successful than it has been in its own right in winning substantial business from British Telecom. The prospect of such business had persuaded the company to invest some $10m from 1983 to expand in the UK, and even to register a Northern Telecom Plc with suggestions that it might float part of the equity of the local unit in London. Most obvious product clash is in PABXs, where Northern Telecom’s SL-1 and SL-X are built under licence by GEC, and ICL sells the Mitel SX2000 exchange. The most sensible solution would be for ICL to drop the Mitel switch, and the planned GEC-Plessey Telecom sell only Plessey’s ISDX.
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