New Intergraph Clipper CPUs aimed at Sparc workstations

Electronic News, Nov 18, 1991 by Gerry Khermouch

CHICAGO -- At the Autofact show last week, Intergraph Corp. sought to leapfrog the price/performance of Sun Microsystems workstations with two new Clipper machines, at the same time that it demonstrated the ease with which Intergraph's I/EMS mechanical-design software can now run on Sun's Sparc architecture.

Meanwhile, the Huntsville, Ala., firm kept the best performance features of its low-priced MicroStation mechanical-design package well-hidden in a hotel suite a block away from the McCormick Center site of the annual factory automation show.

Even as officials at the sparsely attended hotel suite were disclosing that a SparcStation version of MicroStation would be available on Jan. 14 at $3,450, the design package could be viewed on the crowded show floor running only on IBM and Apple PCs, rather than the networked Intergraph- and Sunbased applications which might pose a challenge to Intergraph's more highly functional, but pricier, I/EMS offering. I/EMS is priced in the $20,000 range.

"We were not allowed to show it on Sparc, even though we were announcing availability, and not on Intergraph, even though we've been running on thta platform since 1987," one Intergraph insider associated with the MicroStation effort confirmed in a phone call after the show. "It proves an underlying conflict" within the company.

Such incidents serve to highlight the balancing act Intergraph is performing as it seeks to keep users wedded to the proprietary Clipper hardware and high-end I/EMS software that have generated the company's heftiest margins. Although the new Clipper machines likely will improve the line's competitiveness once they ship next March, Intergraph's decision to port first its electronic and then its mechanical design packages to Sun has put the company "in mortal danger of having a stampede toward Sun among its customers," said Charles Foundyller, president of market researcher Daratech Inc., who did not attend the show.

MicroStation Sparc would seem to be particularly dangerous in that regard, since it has the potential to erode sales of both Clipper and I/EMS. "They're not motivated to sell a product that will undercut their main line," said Doug Richard, president of ITAL Business Computer Systems, a major Sun reseller in Los Angeles who has been itching to sell the new MicroStation Sparc package. "There was a big plan to roll out MicroStation on Sun through the channel, but they backed off it this fall," he said in a telephone interview.

Scott Bentley, vice president of Bentley Systems Inc., an Exton, Pa., firm which develops MicroStation and is half-owned by Intergraph, acknowledged there is a "problem" within Intergraph between the low-end and high-end packages, but declined to comment further.

At the high end, Intergraph for the first time demonstrated on a Sun workstation an updated I/EMS package, version 2.0, which features new variational and parametric modeling functions. The software, which was demoed on the show floor, will ship next March and is priced at $20,000. A version that runs on Intergraph's Clipper machines, also shown, will be available two months earlier at the same price.

Despite the planned availability of I/EMS of Sun, Intergraph chairman Jim Meadlock said in an interview at the exhibit that he expects "less than 50 percent (of future sales) to be tied to Sparc, probably a whole lot less."

A block away in the hotel suite, MicroStationi was running a variety of applications on a network of Sun, Intergraph and DOS-based machines, and product planners there touted it as a cost-effective front end to I/EMS and other high-level packages. They noted that even PC versions of MicroStation support NURBS advanced surfacing, real-time links to relational databases, and associative dimensioning, making it a viable element within distributed, concurrent-engineering environments.

Though MicroStation doesn't offer the fully variational capabilities of I/EMS, Intergraph and Bentley Systems disclosed that Bentley has acquired MCAE Technologies' Cedar constraint-modeling technology to accomplish this.

Asked about the potential of the MicroStation line, however, Mr. Meadlock downplayed it by calling it a "generic product that goes out through the dealer channel. It's a cheap, low-end competitor against Autodesk." As for its potential as a lower-cost seat within a broader network of workstations, Mr. Meadlock acknowledged "we certainly can support that, but we can't sell a product at the level of micros and support it with an expensive sales force."

By contrast, the Los Angeles reseller who would like to sell it on workstations, Mr. Richard, termed MicroStation "brilliant, but PCs don't adequately support it. But MicroStation represents everything (Mr. Meadlock) dislikes about where the world's going," he added.

While that changing environment has caused headaches for Intergraph, just as it has for other vendors of integrated CAD/CAM systems, Intergraph has had its share of successes this year -- a fact that was highlighted by a large battleship motif that served as a backdrop to its exhibit.