After a decade of false starts and failures in the digital private automatic branch exchange business, IBM yesterday effectively threw in the towel and handed over its final attempt to Siemens AG, although it will retain a stake in the US marketing and services operation for the time being. The assets of the Rolm acquisition – bought by IBM in 1985 for $1,500m essentially the Rolm marketing and services operations – will go into a US joint venture with Siemens, the financial status and terms of which were not disclosed. But the development and manufacturing side of Rolm goes into a new Rolm Systems Inc, which will be wholly-owned by Siemens. And in Europe, IBM will market the Siemens HiCom PABX, which implies that the troubled 8751 successor to the 3750 and 1750 has been killed, although IBM could not confirm this by presstime. The two companies will also collaborate on development of voice+data telecommunications applications – implying ISDN – but they in fact have broad agreements in this area already. IBM France was originally chartered to develop a digital successor to the 3750 in the mid 1970s, but ran into such deep trouble that in the early 1980s, the work was transferred to the Raleigh, North Carolina base, which fared little better. IBM in desperation turned to Mitel Corp for a modern switch in 1982, abruptly decided it had made a mistake less than a year later, and bought a small stake in Rolm Corp, and finally bought the company outright in 1985.
