Bernard Moitel, managing director for southern Europe at Sunsoft Inc, has joined the newly beefed up team of Banyan France SA as its managing director with responsibility for defining and implementing the company’s strategy. In France, he said, Banyan’s BeyondMail Enterprise Networking System and messaging system will be positioned as an enterprise communication system, not just another local area networking system. Banyan missed the local network market, because the product was too ambitious for the market as it was then. It could not run on simple personal computers, so Banyan was obliged to take proprietary Motorola Inc servers. With the emphasis now being on enterprise-wide productivity, Banyan’s horizontal system is well adapted, he said. The comparison I used to make at Sunsoft, between Unix serving 1,000 people with one application called payroll, and Windows providing 1,000 people with 1,000 copies of payroll, is the same as the comparison I would make between Banyan and Novell and Microsoft. I believe ENS plus BeyondMail will enable the acceleration of the migration from proprietary systems to client-server, he said. While declaring that the technology is there and reliable, Moitel acknowledged that there has been a lack of international activity at Banyan, so there is lots of work to do. He noted that only 18% of Banyan’s revenues come from outside the US, while between 40% to 50% of revenues of most other telecommunications and computer companies come from international sales. Banyan’s French customers include mobile telecommunications operator Societe Francaise de Radiotelephone SA, construction materials company Usinor-Sacilor SA, and department store chain Le Clerc, as well as French subsidiaries of US companies such as Intel Corp. Moitel, who worked previously for Santa Cruz Operation Inc, says he is a start-up company man (Banyan France will have 10 employees in January). He will also be in charge of the Banyan Spanish subsidiary, which will be opened in April, and of Italy, which opens in 1996. Moitel said he left Sunsoft because of a desire to be in the hot market of enterprise networking, after six and a half years in the Unix market. I’ve gone from Unix for the personal computer at Santa Cruz, to multi-hardware Unix at Sunsoft, to enterprise networking. It makes sense, no? he added questioningly.
