A new company, backed 100% by Spanish capital, has emerged in the systems integration market. Nextel Engineering Systems Sa is to be headed by Christian Barrios, who gained experience with Amdahl Corp and Apple Corp Inc, before a very successful period as managing director of Toshiba Espana SA, which he left only recently. The company is 100%-owned and financed by the Spanish Unipapel Group and Barrios explains that there is currently no company operating in Spain that offers the type of services that Nextel plans to provide: global systems, aimed at optimising and increasing the productivity of a business’s technological resources. Emphasis will also be placed on client-server architecture in open systems environments. Unipapel is planning to plough almost $3m into Nextel during its first year and the group’s managing director, Juan Antonio Lazaro, has pledged that Unipapel was not after immediate profit, but was interested in creating solid activity with a future ahead of it. Nextel will be counting on the support of partners such as Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp, Santa Cruz Operation Inc, 3Com Corp, Sybase Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, Toshiba Corp, Netsys SA and PowerSoft Corp, and the managing directors of these companies in Spain, as well as European regional managers who were present at a recent launch presentation for Nextel. The wide range of products to be offered will include Microsoft’s Windows NT and NT Advanced Server, Unix systems, servers and superservers, network adaptors for personal computers, portable computing systems, gateways and routers, while staff training and comprehensive support, consultancy and maintenance services will also be available. Barrios describes Nextel’s initiative as a pioneering project for a Spanish company, inasmuch as many companies had been seeking the global implementations Nextel will be offering, but had not been successful in finding them. The company will have offices in Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon, and it forecasts turnover for the first year of $3.7m, rising to a targeted $37m a year within four or five years.
