Sales Talk

Birmingham-based West Midlands Fire Service has placed a u37,000 order with international client-server and migration tools vendor Transoft. The fire service will migrate its proprietary Data General (DG) system to Transoft's Open Electronic Office system on a DG Aviion running DG/UX. West Midlands Fire Service needs to transfer information between its command-and-control centre, its sites and staff, which makes email essential. West Midlands Fire Service employs 2,500 staff across 41 sites. Richard Gray, head of IT at West Midlands Fire Service, said: 'We wanted to move to an open Unix system for all the usual good reasons, including better performance and lower cost of ownership. But also we wanted to re-use our mixture of more than 500 dumb terminals and PCs, and have the same email capacity. Furthermore, we do not have time or budget to retrain 2,500 staff, so a solution providing transparency of operation and identical look and feel is critically important for us.' The project will go live this month.

Lloyds Bank Registrars, handler of more than 15 million shareholder accounts for about 400 companies, has signed two contracts with Pericom Desktop Networks, a division of the Pericom Group. One contract is valued at u168,000 for the provision of support for all Lloyds Bank Registrars' desktop equipment. The other involves the supply of 100 Pentium PCs and is valued at u150,000. Pericom has worked with Lloyds Bank Registrars for the last nine years, but this two-year service contract replaces several agreements with other organisations. Pericom will now be used as sole supplier to maintain all desktop equipment. The contract also encompasses the provision of an on-site engineer.

Queens Moat House Hotels has placed an order for hotel management system software developed by Micros Fidelio. The software will run on Siemens Nixdorf PCs in more than 50 of its UK hotels. The front-office software will provide staff with automated reservation, check-in and check-out and billing facilities. It includes interfaces to telephone systems, guest information and billing systems to enable automatic charging. The system is also connected to an electronic key-card system, which cuts room keys when guests check in and invalidates them on their departure. In addition to the delivery and installation of up to 15 PCs and servers in each hotel, Siemens Nixdorf will provide full maintenance services on all hardware.

Land Securities, the UK's largest retail property owner, has chosen Coda-Financials, including purchasing and fixed assets, as its financial system. This 210-user deal is Coda's largest ever in the UK, and is estimated to be worth more than #400,000. The client-server package will be installed on Compaq servers running Windows NT and SQL Server database. Cognos' business intelligence tools PowerPlay and Impromptu will be used to analyse financial data. Coda was chosen for its software's availability on Windows NT and Microsoft SQL Server, its flexibility and technical architecture and for its Coda-Link integration toolkit. The first stage of the package - fixed assets - will go live in April this year. The rest of the project will be implemented by 1998.

South Western Electricity (Sweb) has invested more than u250,000 in Smallworld's geographically linked asset management and business analysis software. The system will integrate with other corporate IT systems, including customer support and infrastructure maintenance. The initial phase of the development, conversion of around 10Gb of CAD data, has already begun. This is expected to rise to about 36Gb once data conversion is completed by the end of 1997. Sweb believes it will be able to use a proportion of the converted data by the second quarter of 1997 for network planning purposes.