Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems AG has decided to sell its TransView systems management business to Computer Associates International Inc. CA will inherit the TransView installed base and migrate it to a new version of its own CA-Unicenter TNG product. CA will continue to support TransView until at least September 2000. It declined to say how much it is paying or how many TransView users SNI has, other than that the majority are in Europe. CA said all TransView personnel, including development and marketing staff will be retained and transferred to new development centers in Munich and Paderborn, Germany. CA president Sanjay Kumar admitted there is some overlap between the two products but said it would be CA’s first priority to work out the best way of combining all the complementary parts together in TNG. He said CA wanted to take advantage of SNI’s substantial strength, particularly its SAP AG blue chip customers in Germany, as well as getting its hands on an extra 150 staff to boost development efforts in Europe. He said the two companies would work together to ensure that TransView customers had a seamless, easy migration path to Unicenter TNG. SNI will bundle TNG with its Unix servers (RM series) and NT servers (Primergy series) at no charge to customers. The TransView SAP R/3 management will stay with SNI and will be offered, as an option, on top of the Unicenter TNG Framework for all R/3 customers. Robert Hoog, president of the computer systems division of SNI’s information and communication products group said that up until now SNI had been cautious of moving out of its traditional European stronghold but that the new partnership would allow it to take advantage of CA’s strong position on a worldwide basis. He said SNI has opted to keep hold of its SAP R/3 management software because it was a source of differentiation for its server platform. However, he added that SNI would work to further enhance and integrate the software for Unicenter TNG. SNI customers will receive a free product upgrade when migrating to the corresponding Unicenter TNG offerings up until March 1999.
