ICL’s DRS 6000 product took centre stage at the company’s ninth vendor conference this year entitled Partners in System Integration as the company outlined its European sourcing goal and announced a push into OEM sales with its Unix box. According to Rod Powell, director of manufacturing and logistics, the 200 executives at the conference are facing a great vendor opportunity, since ICL is committed to reducing its key suppliers at the same time as it is increasing its amount of spend. ICL’s chief operating executive, John Dickson, is justifiably proud of the company’s 1989 financial performance but warned that 1990 is going to be a tough year. He swiftly added that products such as the DRS 6000, the Essex mainframe, the PCT personal computer range and OfficePower software will generate another strong year in terms of revenue and profits. As for the DRS 6000, orders are reported to be running ahead of budget and the multiprocessor version being developed in Irvine, California (DRS 6000 MP) will be released in the third quarter. Essex was celebrated as being one in the eye for IBM’s allegiance to plumbing in the top end mainframe market. The PCT range, which is the fruit of ICL’s alliance with the Taiwanese company Acer Corp, shipped 30,000 units in 1989 and will ship 70,000 units this year. Meanwhile, ICL claims a 10% share of the UK office automation market with its OfficePower software for which it has sold 120,000 licenses. In the third quarter the company will release an open version of OfficePower called Tempo which will have links to databases other than Ingres, via structured query language and will be X/Open XPG 3-compliant. This move acts as insurance against the day when Ingres jumps in with DEC, although Andy Roberts, director of systems integration, doesn’t believe that such a move will greatly affect ICL’s relationship with Ingres, since the two companies are tied most closely at the mainframe level through development work with VME. To wit Ingres version 6.0 will be out on VME later in the year.

Memory spending down

As for ICL’s European sourcing goal of 70% by the end of 1992 this appears to be on target with the company now obtaining 40% of its product-related purchases from European sources. For example, low cost laser printers are now sourced from Mannesmann Tally instead of from Ricoh, while a fifth of 1M-bit DRAMs are now being sourced from Siemens with the rest coming from Toshiba. ICL would like to encourage its US and Japanese vendors to invest in manufacture in Europe as Oki Electric Industry has, which means that ICL can now claim a European source for its dot matrix printers. European sourcing can only go so far, however, as components such as 4M-bit DRAMs are not available in Europe until Siemens gets its parts out in volume. At the conference, vendors were given details of ICL’s product-related procurement which is budgeted at UKP440m this year. Sadru Nanji, manager of ICL’s Components Product Centre said that the spend on memory devices was down, reflecting how artificially high it had been for most of last year. He said that as the book-to-bill ratio has been stable, he has budgeted for low single figure growth for 1990. He is pleased that the Rule of Origin has finally been set for semiconductors manufactured within the Single European market. The dumping issue has also been resolved, but now ICL is looking for the abolition from the current GATT negotiations of the 14% tariff imposed on imported semiconductors that penalises electronic goods made in Europe. – Katy Ring