Sun Microsystems Inc has made its first move into retail distribution, signing an agreement with the publicly-quoted Dataphaz Inc, a Tempe, Arizona-based ComputerLand franchisee, which has eight stores in the south-west US. Dataphaz is to be authorised to offer the full line of Unix workstations and will form a separate group to handle the new activity. It will initially put the stations through three of its store – the ones in Phoenix and in Tucson, Arizona, and the one in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Although Dataphaz is the biggest single ComputerLand franchisee in the US, it is much smaller than Businessland Inc, which is taking the NeXT Inc Unix-based NeXT Computer System.
