Steve Hui, founder, president and chief executive of Everex Systems Inc, Fremont, California has big ambitions for his six-year-old company: he wants it to climb to third place in the league of world personal computer manufacturers behind IBM and Apple Computer, relegating Compaq Computer to fourth place and allowing Tandy Corp, which he rates strongly, to come in at fifth. Hui – say it Hoy, but call him Steve, he much prefers it – was over for the UK launch of the Step 386/33 machine, which, appropriately given the go-faster stripes on the company’s logo, was held at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Sunday. Nigel Mansell In between the combined roars of the Honda and Ferrari engines and of the crowd as Nigel Mansell maintained a hot pursuit of Alan Prost’s Marlboro McLaren for the entire 65 laps, Hui pronounced his company philosophy and his ambitions, to which, he says, he has dedicated his life. He hails from mainland China, and arrived in the US via Hong Kong, and a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin, followed by a spell studying electronics and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley set him up for a career that started at Amdahl Corp. He moved on to Storage Technology Corp’s ambitious but ultimately doomed venture to design a high-end IBMulator in CMOS, and when the development team was broken up, he decided that the time had come to fulfil his destiny and in 1983 founded Everex Systems as an integrator of boards and peripheral subsytems for MS-DOS microcomputers. The building of the company’s own AT-alikes followed, and an 80486 is promised to follow the Step 386 family. Most notable departure is the company’s decision to go to Opus Systems Inc for Motorola 88000 boards that plug into the Step machines as back-end processors, and Hui sees the combination as an ideal development system for software authors wanting to write applications for the 88000 under Unix. Indeed Hui’s eyes light up at the mention of Unix, and he says that while it represents a tiny proportion of the company’s business at present – for the nine months to the end of April it did $14.6m net – up 93% – on sales up 49% at $280m, and looks for between $370m and $400m for the year to July – all the company’s software research and development is going into the Unix arena – its first offering was the real/stable Enix implementation of Unix System V.3 for its 80386 machines (CI No 890). And the effort is not inconsiderable: the company’s entire Los Angeles operation is given over to it, a software development centre will open in Singapore shortly, and a Canadian development base is in the plan for Vancouver. Manufacturing is done at the company’s Fremont headquarters and in Hong Kong. Murray Walker And that early base in the Crown Colony takes Steve Hui back close to his origins, and highlights the influences that have guided his philosophy for the company. His mission at Everex is to combine the Chinese tradition of the family firm, where everyone chips in and lends a hand without seeking to pull rank in pursuit of the common good – working seven days a week, 7am to 1am, as Everex was recently when orders swamped its available inventory – with the dedication to excellence of the Japanese company, and the entrepreneurial drive of the US venture capital start up. A typically Japanese attitude to short term fluctuations came when the Wall Street market crashed only weeks after Everex had gone public in 1987 at the market’s peak. The first Hui knew about it was when the company’s anxious brokers called to ask for comment; business was fine as far as Hui was concerned, so the market was an irrelevance and quickly to be forgotten. The company philosophy he characterises as horizontal, with all employees involved in decision making where appropriate – a concept that went down very well with the UK journalists on Sunday, who took it into their own hands to switch the TVs in the chalet over to the race, and alternately turn Murray Walker up and down. But Hui’s corporate role model is a very conserv
ative – and highly successful – one, namely Hewlett-Packard Co. To be as successful – and successful in a similar manner, as Hewlett is another of his aims for Everex. At close to $400m a year, the company has clearly not yet reached the critical mass that provides a platform from which a computer company can consolidate, expand and diversify with the certainty that it will still be around in five years – but Everex is growing very fast and is already pulling ahead of a large crowd that includes many players several years its senior. And a year from now, if things go to plan, things will look better still, with the current target sales of between $500m and $600m. Where is that growth to come from? James Hunt Hui sees enormous potential in Europe, and that is not surprising since sales outside the US account for just 8% of the total. It has chosen the UK – its offices are in Colindale, London NW – as the springboard for an assault on the continent and fiscal 1990 to July has been marked out as the year of international expansion. Everex machines marked the first venture by Softsel UK Ltd into computer distribution – it now also handles Zenith Data Systems machines (CI No 1,217) – but the selection of the Everex machines represented a nice entre into the UK market for Steve Hui’s company. Key selling point of the Step 386/33 is the company’s proprietary Advanced Memory Management Architecture with large static memory cache, which is claimed to enable the sporty 33MHz machine to race away at 8.3 MIPS and outperform the other 80386-based machines, a claim that will no doubt be hotly contested. Processor prices start at UKP3,500 with 1Mb memory and 64Kb cache, and an 8Mb CPU with 128Kb cache is UKP5,900. When it comes to the plunge into Unix, all is to play for but clearly the company’s future depends crucially on its success. Despite the British influence in Hong Kong, Steve Hui has not – as yet incorporated any British elements into his company role model, but if – with acknowledgements to the Observer – he can temper the gung-ho enthusiasm of the turbocharged Murray Walker with the cool, considered reason of the normally aspirated James Hunt, he may find himself well set to establish the computer industry’s next Chinese dynasty.
