Retix Inc says it has added an OS/2 version of its OpenServer 400 family of OSI X400-based messaging servers. The new product, which is designed for OS/2 v.1.3, joins the MS-DOS, Santa Cruz and Interactive Systems Unix versions already available. Also new are a set of gateway products, due soon for European launch, including MS Mail for personal computer networks and an SMTP Unix Gateway to X400. The new gateways work with OpenServer 400 to provide users of personal computer network electronic mail systems operability with other electronic mail systems, mainframe and mini-based processors, and public mail networks supporting X400. Additional gateways to X400 are currently available for user of 3Net, cc.Mail, NetWare MHS, OfficeWorks, MS Mail for Macintosh and WordPerfect. In the UK, Guildford, Surrey-based Retix UK Ltd has appointed a new managing director, Gareth Buchanan-Robinson, who will answer for the UK, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Benelux, the Middle East and Africa. He exudes enthusiasm and has high hopes that Retix Inc will be a $200m company by 1995. Today Retix is a $60m company, Europe contributing a generous $40m of the US company’s business. Why? New managing director – call me Gareth, everyone else does (it’s less of a mouthful than Buchanan-Robinson) says Europe is far more mature than the US in Open Systems Interconnection and open networking, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Scandinavia being the hottest takers of the relatively new technology. Retix, which went into OSI software as early as 1985, claims some 90% of the worldwide market, which the firm reckons is still in its infancy – it must be if Retix, owning 90% of the market, is turning over only $60m. Gareth reckons the OSI market is set to grow by 300% over the next two years. Growth to date, he says, has been at an annual rate of 30% in the UK, but only 15% in the US. The Santa Monica, California-based OSI-dedicated company – which incidentally also endorses TCP/IP, believing the two standards can co-exist harmoniously – today has 400 employees, 150 of them in Europe, and that’s after the company closed down its UK bridge-router manufacturing plant last year to merge the production activities into those already existing in Santa Monica. The company floated on NASDAQ in mid-December since when its shares are claimed to have doubled to around $17.75. Retix sells networking tools, via master distributors such as Azlan Ltd in the UK, to OEM customers, systems integrators – such as ICL Plc, British Telecommunications Plc and ACT Logsys Ltd, and corporate end users, and it is the last sector on which Retix UK plans to be concentrating in the immediate future. Retix sees its corporate end users clustered into four target areas – financial, government, petrochemical and industrial, and names to date include Reuters Holdings Plc, National Westminster Bank Plc, Barclays Bank Plc and Shell Oil. Retix sees a shrink-wrapped OSI X400 product as being its main offering to these users.
