ICL Plc has won a $2.1m contract with the Hungarian Land Office – a division of the Department of Agriculture. Under the terms of the deal, ICL will supply the office with 61 Novell Inc personal computer local networks complete with servers, which will be used to manage land registration data. The application software has been developed internally by the Land Office and the project is being paid for with a grant from the European Community’s PHARE programme. ICL country manager Ian Leach claimed the company’s national service network was critical in securing the contract, and argued the account was a major breakthrough for the firm, marking as it does ICL’s entry into the government sector as well as endorsing its emerging local status as a supplier of networked personal computer systems. The Land Office is likely to become a major computer procurer in the coming year due to the country’s requirement for Geographic Information Systems. These are widely believed to be a necessary pre-requisite for the development of a mortgage-based credit economy. Under the socialist system, boundaries between parcels of land – particularly in the state enterprise sector – were often ill-defined, a problem which has caused delays in some privatisations and once threatened a $50m acquisition by the Marriot Hotel chain. Leach claimed ICL was moving into Geographic Information Systems, but placed a higher emphasis on potential demand for its PLANES local authority asset management system. Leach also said that ICL has completed the acquisition of the CBEIS banking application package from the Budapest-based software co-operative, Trendy, ICL Hungary has taken on-board the five-man core development team of the C and Clipper-based package, which according to Leach has so far been installed in 180 branches at three of four Hungarian banks. The CBEIS development team will operate as a semi-autonomous unit within the subsidiary. The acquisition is intended to strengthen the firm’s presence in the commercial retail banking sector, an area in which ICL is yet to make a major breakthrough. ICL is set to announce a major drive into the personal computer sector in Hungary in the near future – a move first said to be on the cards in January – but no details have so far been made public.
