Bull and NEC Will Announce European Server Joint Venture

Computergram International, Oct 12, 1999

French IT concern Groupe Bull and Packard Bell-NEC, the computer arm of Japanese electronics concern NEC Corp, will tomorrow unveil a partnership for a joint assault on the Intel server market in Europe.

The new entity will be called Express Servers SAS and will be responsible for defining and marketing a product line ranging from 1- to 8-way servers on NEC and Intel chipsets, to be distributed under the two companies' separate logos and through their separate distribution channels.

The machines will all be produced by Packard Bell-NEC at its plant in Angers, France. To this end Bull will be announcing, along with the creation of the joint venture, an OEM agreement with NEC, explained its vice-president for Intel servers and PCs, Jean-Philippe Chiarella.

The two groups' collaboration in the IT sector pre-dates the current joint venture, NEC having supplied machines to Bull from its Zenith Data Systems subsidiary, though 'ZDS was focussed on PCs and notebooks,' Chiarella explained.

The two companies currently supply about 3.7% of the European Intel server market, said the Bull executive, and as a result of the joint venture, they hope to increase their share in the Old Continent to around 7%-10% within the next three years. Their collaboration comes months after another Euro-Japanese tie-up in the continent's computer market, with Germany's Siemens and Japan's Fujitsu merging their entire IT businesses in Europe (CI No 3,694).