Wang Laboratories Inc has over the last few weeks been presenting its renewal strategy to customers, in a series of worldwide seminars, in an attempt to convince them that Wang has moved on from the times of financial difficulty and product diversity, to become a new and focused organisation with the strenth of IBM Corp behind it. Malachy Smith, Wang regional manager for North West Europe, rounded up the UK seminars with a press briefing in London on Thursday evening. He highlighted the fact that Wang’s bank debt of $575m was repaid in total during 1991, that the last four quarters saw revenues stabilised at around $492m, that there had been a trading profit of around $4m for the last two quarters, and that product bookings had exceeded revenues in those quarters. He talked at length about Wang’s office strategy, since office and imaging systems has long been a strength of the company, and is these days all Wang has got to pin its hopes on. Key to Wang’s office strategy is the BPM cycle – that’s Business Process Management. Basically, now that Wang has got three of IBM’s hardware environments – the RS/6000 (which Wang is badging the Wang RISC Series), AS/400 and PS/2 – the company wants to operate under the guise of a limited consultancy-cum-systems integrator, advising customers on an integrated office environment, comprising any combination of Wang proprietary VS systems and the IBM boxes, alongside the customer’s existing hardware; Wang’s campaign slogan is offices that work. To persuade customers that their investment in VS is safe, Wang has announced some 37 new and enhanced VS products, including the high-end VS 12000 Mercury system, which are to be released over the next 12 months. Office 2000 describes the third generation of Wang products, services and consultancy, which the renewed Wang will aim at the financial services, government, health services, insurance, legal and manufacturing markets. A timetable for release of Wang’s new products includes launch next month of new high-end VS 12000 models 550 and 650, multiple hardware enhancements, OS 7.40, VS WP Connect, language enhancements, printing-scanner enhancements, VS Voice Server and Office X400 Gateway in the VS line, as well as RISC Series connectivity platform and software applications, VS/PC systems and applications, personal computer local area network imaging enhancements and new systems, and RISC Series Migration I Professional Services. These will be followed in later months by the launch of Open/Image for Digital Equipment Corp’s VAX/VMS, Computer Associates Image-enabled applications, as well as VS/IBM and VS server enhancements. Separately, in the US last week, the Lowell, Massachusetts company added speech processing systems for the office designed for use as voice-mail servers for speech and electronic mail on local networks. Designed to be integrated with Wang’s communications, imaging and computing applications, to provide networked and stand-alone speech systems combined with data processing on the same machine.
