As we went to press, details were being finalised for the acquisition of office automation software house Redwood International Plc, which trades under the Uniplex name, by IMI Plc, the Birmingham, UK engineering group previously known as Imperial Metal Industries, a UKP1,000m-a-year business. IMI Computing Ltd, the subsidiary with US offices in Greenwich, Connecticut has concentrated on the IBM proprietary market, and worked closely with IBM Corp on OfficeVision. Increasingly interested in Unix, IMI bought Brook Street Computers Ltd back in October 1990: Brook Street’s highly regarded Unity range of business software modules already includes a tight tie-in with the Uniplex office automation suite. The eventual result could be a unification of efforts to form a single software and services company within IMI with a turnover in the region of UKP50m, and probably already makes the combined Brook Street-Uniplex the largest supplier of Unix software in Europe. Over the last few years, Uniplex has won a string of lucrative UK and US defence deals and claims leadership in the Unix integrated office automation league – although rival Quadratron Inc disputes the way the figures are measured. Even so, it was not large enough to invest the necessary cash to ensure it will be able to compete in a few years, when the majors enter and competition becomes really intensive.
