Digital says no impact from suit against Intel
Reuters Story - May 14, 1997 00:57
FINANCIAL DEC INTC MSFT V%REUTER P%RTR
By Josephine Ng
SINGAPORE, May 14 (Reuter) - Digital Equipment Corp
said on Wednesday it did not see its business affected by its
suit against Intel Corp for patent infringement.
"There's no impact to us continuing to sell our products, no
impact on our worldwide operations," Darke M. Sani, managing
director of Digital Singapore told Reuters.
He said this was because Intel supplies chips to Digital on
a long-term contract.
But he declined to say how the suit could affect
relationship between the two companies on the corporate level.
Digital filed a lawsuit in the United States late on Monday
alleging that Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker,
infringed on 10 Digital patents in all its versions of its
Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium II chips.
Digital is seeking to force Intel to stop using its
technology and "quite huge" damages.
On Wednesday, Digital in Singapore introduced desktop
personal computers and personal workstations based on Intel's
Pentium chips, including its latest Pentium II microprocessor.
It also launched workstations and servers based on its
fastest Alpha 21164 microprocessor with a speed of 600 MHz that
runs on both Unix and Windows NT operating systems.
Trevor Dodd, manager of workstation business segment for
Southeast Asia, said Digital was supporting both Unix and
Windows NT as industry expectations were that demand for
workstation operating systems would be equal for both by 2000.
By that time, 40 percent of all computer systems would be
based on Windows NT, Darke said.
Digital hoped to sell twice the volume of workstations in
1997 over 1996 in the ASEAN region, Dodd said.
Revenues from workstations in Southeast Asia could then
increase by 50 percent, he added, but declined to reveal revenue
figures.
Digital's share of revenue from workstations in the region
could reach 25 percent in 1997 and share in terms of units would
be over 20 percent as well, Dodd said.
According to research firm International Data Corp's (IDC)
report, Digital's workstation share had risen to 17.2 percent in
the first three quarters of 1996 compared to 7.4 percent in the
same period in 1995.
In terms of revenues from workstations, Digital's share rose
to 20.3 percent from 10.2 percent.
Officials said Digital was working with Microsoft Corp
on the next version of Windows NT which would be 64-bit
and this was expected to undergo beta testing at the end of
1997.
-- Singapore newsroom (65-8703080) |
