Conference 7.286::digital

3229.0. "News from professional and business publications news" by GIDDAY::SETHI (Better to ask a question than remain ignorant) Sat Jul 02 1994 09:08

    Hi All,

    I am opening this topic to encourage people to enter news items from
    professional and business world regarding Digital.  What do they really
    think of us in your part of the world ?
    
    Regards,
    
    Sunil
    
    Here is a report from Computer World.
    
    		Hostages of the Far Side
    
    It's always an uncomfortable feeling to realise that Australian IT
    customers are essentially hostages to decisions made on the far side of
    the world.
    
    I am thinking especially of customers of the Australian subsidiaries of
    American computer vendors. Even though a local unit may be doing very
    well in the Australian market, it inevitably suffers when overseas
    management make poor decisions. Digital Equipment Corp. is a recent
    case in point.
    
    As we reported last month, a $US183 million third-quarter loss prompted
    DEC's American management to announce worldwide staff cuts totalling
    20000 people (CW May 13, p1). Nearly 100 Australian employees were
    retrenched. The irony is that DEC did very well in Australia last year;
    it increased operating revenues by more than 20 per cent to $560
    million.
    
    The fact is, DEC's US management grossly underestimated the time needed
    to change their business model from that of proprietary minicomputer
    vendor to a lean and mean open systems player. They failed to realise
    that sales of the former bread-and-butter VAX line would ramp down far
    more rapidly than Alpha sales would ramp up.
    
    Their latest piece of brilliance is successfully creating great
    uncertainty over DEC's product line. Cheif executive Robert Palmer has
    acknowledged that he is looking to sell of pieces of the farm. But
    which piece ? Nobody knows. industry analysts say likely prospects for
    sale include Digital's storage division, its components and peripherals
    business and it's Itel-based PC business.
    
    The point is, Australian customers don't know where the axe will fall.
    Will DEC sell off its storage division ? Its Rdb database ? Nobody
    knows. There was even a rumour last week that the networking business
    was a potential sell-off candidate. The Americans wouldn't comment, but
    DEC Australia was emphatic that this wasn't so. Not that such a move
    would make much sense, considering DEC's mission over the past decade
    of being the top networking/integration vendor.
    
    Now DEC users traditionally are a loyal bunch. They like their vendor,
    and they are generally keeping faith. But corporate IS managers have to
    sell their spending plans to executive management, and those of you
    doing just that know full well how tough a sell it is becoming.
    
    So DEC's senior US managers need to do two things.  The first is to
    focus exclusively on helping the vast VAX installed base to migrate to
    open systems architecture, utilising the company's outstaning
    networking and integration capabilities to do so.
    
    But even more importantly, they must act now to stem the uncertainity
    in users' minds.  - Steve Ireland, Editor-in-Chief.
    

    I am entering this, I got it via an em.
              
    The Technology Fundamentalist
    June/July 1994
    
    
    
    Digital Equipment: The New Hewlett Packard
    
    What? Isn't DEC supposed to be on the ropes? Forget
    everything you've read, as usual the analysts have
    missed this one bad. In fact DEC is looking pretty
    good. They're going to be the new HP of the late 90s
    and we're going to see big things from them well before
    the year is out.
    
    So what gives? Look at the following:
    
        While everyone is drooling over the 66 MHz Power
        PC, DEC has had its 200+ MHz Alpha chip out for
        some time and is well ahead of the rest of the
        industry; sales, initially slow because people
        didn't know what to do with so much power,are now
        taking off as the software and networking vendors
        solve the problem for them.
    
        Its Alpha based servers are streets ahead of any of
        the competition in terms of power, quality,
        scalability and suitability for real mission
        critical applications.
    
        It's quietly but rapidly becoming a major PC
        seller, probably will be in the top 10 this year
        moving from 15th last year.
    
        It's already the leading vendor of video servers,
        which will soon be the hottest area of the server
        industry.
    
    DEC is already ahead of the technology curve. It's not
    whimping out, like some other hardware companies we
    know, by claiming that it's going to be a software and
    services company, whining that its not possible to make
    money in hardware any more.
    
    The real story of course is that DEC engineering and
    networking skills are ideally suited to the type of
    computing environment that is just starting t emerge
    for the information superhighway, namely very high
    power, scalability and availability, powerful
    networking, and leading hardware, particularly video
    servers. No one else in the industry can match DEC in
    these.
    
    Pretty soon the cycle is going to swing back to the
    hardware companies because there's been such a
    shakeout. DEC is right in there.
    
    Remember when Hewlett Packard was being written off a
    few years ago as being an old line scientific-oriented
    culture run by engineers. Then it got faith, introduced
    the, for then, very risky RISC and the rest is history.
    Alpha is DEC's RISC and we're going to see the results
    very soon.

    
    
    Cheered me up !!

    by then, the 12 or so DECcies remaining will have cause to celebrate!

What's this DEC company?  Did someone steal our design for Alpha?
Well, whomever this DEC company is, they seem to be doing a better job of
selling Alpha than Digital is.