While Tera Microsystems Inc gives up the ghost, Sparcette house Opus Systems Inc, Fremont, California has picked up a heavyweight new president, Tandem Computers Inc co-founder Jim Katzman, and raised $4m in a fifth round of venture capital from previous investors including Venture Partners, Merrill Pickard Anderson Eyre, Glenwood Management, Bryan & Edwards and OSCCO Ventures. It says the money, brought in by the company’s new chief financial officer David Garret armed with its new business plan, will be used to fuel growth and new product development. Katzman, a 45-year-old venture capitalist, who also helped start Amdahl Corp and launch Hewlett-Packard Co into computers, has been acting as a full-time consultant to the Opus board for the last six months. He says the new Opus business plan seeks to avoid meeting Sun head-to-head in the hardware arena and will instead exploit the firm’s hidden software talents. The new plan, reportedly still somewhat rough, calls for Opus to start unbundling and building system software products such as tools that will enable the sea of Windows 3.0 screens to use any Unix application. Katzman, still secretive about the exact nature of the software, is expecting to announce the first suite next quarter. The new direction for Opus, its third in the last year, does not imply that it is abandoning its Sparcsystem clone or Sparc board businesses, currently its only revenue source. In fact, last week it announced and started shipping the Personal Mainframe 5124, a 29-MIPS 40MHz Sparc workstation, with pricing from $7,205. Opus is the second Sparcette company in as many weeks – Solbourne Computer Corp being the other – to head off into software on finding the Sparc business merciless. Katzman, Garret and the plan must be convincing if they have managed to draw another $4m from venture capital firms already burned by Opus squandering millions, as Katzman himself admits. In fact, he declined to tally the amount Opus had secured in its preceding four rounds.
