Ultimate Corp is casting its hungry eye over the UK which it considers to be an important part of the Pick world. It acknowledges that McDonnell Douglas is the market leader in the country and thanks it for building up the user base but is now determined to wrest that lead and user base from it. Over the last year Ultimate’s UK partner Honeywell Bull has taken two orders for Police systems which had previously been McDonnell Douglas’ turf and has also competed against McDonnell Douglas and in a couple of instances won orders from traditional McDonnell Douglas customers. Ultimate anticipates that the recently available 68020-based 1400 system (CI No 784) will sell well throughout Europe and do well against the Unix opposition. When asked to comment on the battle for supremacy between Pick and Unix, Ted Sabarese, Ultimate’s president, has a stock answer: If Dick Pick owned Unix and Pick was owned by a telephone company you would never have heard of Unix. Sabarese is confident that Pick is the best operating system around but admits that the company is hedging its bets by having a Pick under Unix implementation. Ultimate first entered continental Europe three years ago after IN2 was relieved of its monopoly. Its first forays there it admits were unsuccesful but having poached one of IN2’s key staff the operation took a turn for the better but still has a long way to go before it reaches even UK standards. Although Ultimate realises that Honeywell Bull would probably like to supply all its hardware, it has recently developed a relationship with Tandem (CI NO 767) and signed an OEM contract with IBM for thousands of 9370s (CI NO 778). The company built it business up on its Honeywell relationship and says that Honeywell hardware accounts for about half of its machine count but in terms value – 80%. About 15 DEC VAX/MicroVAX systems are being shipped per month and Ultimate adds that the other hardware platforms are still in their infancy as far as its operating system is concerned. Ultimate says that it is not currently engaged in talks with any other manufacturers but will continue to acquire its own resellers that perform well, adding that 40% of its vol-ume sales come from ones it has acquired. According to Ultimate the Pick market was worth $2,000m last year and is growing at $500m per year. Sabarese puts Ultimate’s share of the market at 30%.
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