SII users concerned over company's lack of Mac plans

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The recession plaguing America's newspapers is over, if attendance at the spring System/55-System/25 Users Group conference is any guide.

For the first time in three years, attendance topped 100 as users representing 40-plus System Integrators Inc. sites in the United States and Canada met March 6-9 in SII's home town. Two sites in Britain and one in Australia also were represented.

Since the group last met in October in Toronto, former SII president and CEO Mike Reisenweber has moved into the new position of chief technology officer, with Bill Aaronson taking the reins of the company.

Reisenweber -- who took command of SII in 1992, after the resignation of Al Edwards -- said he relished the move into a technological position. In his new role, he will help determine the direction of research and development, and seek new marketing opportunities for SII.

Aaronson addressed the SII filing for bankruptcy protection, telling users that the company was entering the "final phase of reorganization" and hoped to emerge from Chapter 11 by early summer.

Senior lenders endorsed the company's five-year strategic business plan in December, Aaronson said, and the company began working on a structured plan for financial reorganization. That plan, which spells out who owns which portions of SII and how much debt the company will carry when it emerges from bankruptcy, was submitted to the court early in March.

Aaronson said he hoped SII could conclude negotiations with lenders on the final details of the plan by May or June.

SII filed for bankruptcy protection in hopes of restructuring its debt load, he noted, while maintaining a philosophy of "business as usual."

"The basic business is doing very well," Aaronson said. SII posted $7.6 million in profit on revenues of $56 million for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 -- 10 days after the Chapter 11 filing.

During the 1993 fiscal year, SII landed 16 new accounts worldwide, Aaronson noted; it has secured six more since then.

In the coming year, "we're going to raise the visibility of the company with a very aggressive advertising campaign" and heightened presence at trade shows, Aaronson said.

Projected revenue for this year will be down, he said, as a result of the shift from being a hardware company to becoming a software supplier. Despite that, he pledged to maintain the yearly investment of $5.5 million to $6 million in research and development, making that a larger slice of a shrinking pie.

While relations between the company and user group members generally were smooth during the session, some verbal fireworks erupted at a workshop dealing with SII's approach to PowerPCs and other new technology.

Representatives of several sites made it clear that they weren't ready to wait until SII had an editor working on the Power Mac -- they wanted Coyote functionality on a Macintosh platform, and they wanted it now.

Reisenweber seemed surprised at the level of interest in such a product, noting that SII's sales force had not been aware of user sentiment.

"For us to parallel what we do on the Intel platform would be impossible," he said, adding that the potential return on a Macintosh Coyote would be too small to warrant the development expense.

That led several members to threaten to take their business "down the road" to Loomis, Calif., where CE Engineering is developing Decade/33 -- a product that enables Macintoshes and Intel-based PCs to link to a Tandem mainframe with Coyote functionality.

In response to the intensity of feelings on display, Reisenweber eventually conceded that increased Coyote functions on a Mac was "an issue that we'll need to take a look at."

SII has made concessions to the Macintosh community over the years, starting with the company's 1989 agreement to market Mac products developed by Digital Technology Inc. of Orem, Utah. That agreement fell by the wayside as DTI became more of a front-end player, though SII still markets DTI's Macintosh-based display ad product, AdSpeed.

In addition, the company provided Tandem-to-Mac connectivity with its Mac/55 application, which is now called Siimac. This allows users to send and receive SII e-mail on their Macintoshes as well as see SII directories as folders on their Mac systems.

Siimac doesn't provide any type of text editing capability and some users have said that they need to put traditional Coyote terminals beside Macintoshes running Siimac so users can scroll incoming wires.

SII's pagination product, Interactive News Layout, was the subject of a report by Randy Seelye of the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press-Democrat.

In January, he said, SII representatives met with delegates from 10 sites using INL. The session was organized to hammer out an upgrade path for current INL sites when the product is ported from the proprietary Ring operating system to OS/2 terminals that could also run SII's MTX Coyote software.

The port is scheduled to be available in October. Under the agreement, current sites will have to purchase the requisite network and hardware platform -- a minimum '486 terminal with 12 megabytes of RAM and a 180 megabyte hard drive -- and pay a fee of $2000 per workstation.

New INL sites will pay $14,000 per seat, plus network and hardware costs.

The general feeling among those at the session was that SII needs to develop products independent of any particular operating system.

OS/2 drew pointed barbs from some in the group.

Mark Tackley-Goodman, president of the SII European Users Group, described OS/2 as "a non-starter" in Europe. He said his group was concerned that SII was putting all its eggs for advanced systems in the OS/2 basket.

"They are not going to sell MTX in Europe at all," he told the group, because it's too expensive and users don't like it. "SII is blatantly refusing to follow the market," Tackley-Goodman said.

During his presentation Monday afternoon, Aaronson conceded that OS/2 was "not popular" in Europe, while noting it was meeting with good acceptance in America and Asia.

At a four-hour session at SII headquarters, users got hands-on tryouts of major products. These included: