Half a loaf is a lot better than no bread, and Pete Taylor and Robert Davis, the two managers who wanted to organise a management buyout of the former Fortune Systems Corp have won themselves half a loaf with an agreement under which they will buy Fortune’s international operations from SCI Systems Corp, Huntsville, Alabama – and add SCI’s Intel-based Unix machines to the 68020-based Fortune product line. The move makes sense because although SCI has a contract assembly operation in Scotland it has no computer market presence outside the Americas. The international operations, headquartered in Monaco, become a new company, Fortune Systems International, with Robert Davis as president and Pete Taylor as chairman. The new company gets exclusive worldwide marketing rights to both the Fortune and SCI lines outside North and South America. The sale, on undisclosed terms, was made to provide Davis and Taylor with the necessary entrepreneurial incentives to continue to make this segment of the business successful, and to provide SCI with an effective international distribution arm, according to SCI. Separately, what is left of Fortune Systems Corp has decided to seek to change its name to Tigera Group Inc, to avoid confusion with the new SCI operations.
