Following the demise of ICL’s one distributor in Turkey, Mistas, the company has now signed a sole distributorship agreement with Istanbul-based software house, Ekdata. Mistas ceased trading at the beginning of this year. Under the terms of the agreement, initially valued at UKP2.9m, ICL will supply the Unix-based Clan range, the DRS 300 and System 25. ICL sees Turkey as high growth market for information systems – currently there is a plethora of out-dated systems and consequently the Turkish government has passed laws making it more difficult to import old technology rather than current generation products. Another move to help Turkey step into the world of high technology is the regulation that calls for distributors of technology to have at least one office in each of the seven Turkish provinces, thus preventing small outfits from setting up, making quick money and promptly going out of business leaving unsupported equipment behind them. Distributors also have to register all contracts with the Ministry of Science and be prepared to have their operations scrutinised regularly. ICL says that it has no plans to licence product manufacturing in Turkey in the short term but it is open to discussion. Ekdata will initially concentrate on the public services and defence vertical markets but will be looking into the undiscovered market, in Turkey, automation for retailers. Ekdata’s software for sales and purchase accounting, import- export processing, stock control and municipal applications, written for old NCR machines, are being converted for ICL’s Clan and DRS 300 systems. ICL will train Ekdata staff and will be helping out at the forthcoming Office Equipment and Computer Fair, Bukoma ’87, next week.
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