Big deal for Smalltalk - Smalltalk vendors ParcPlace Systems Inc and Digitalk Inc merge to better compete against IBM - Brief Article

Software Magazine, July, 1995 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Although Smalltalk's key vendors publicly welcomed IBM's entry into their market, ParcPlace Systems Inc. and Digitalk Inc. merged recently to better compete with Big Blue. The two companies' stock swap was valued at about $50 million.

According to Bill Lyons, president and CEO of ParcPlace, Sunnyvale, Calif., the new company is committed to merging the two Smalltalk versions while providing backward-compatibility. New versions of Santa Ana, Calif.-based Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk Enterprise for Windows 95 and NT Server, as well as ParcPlace's VisualWorks, are on schedule to be released by Q4/95, Lyons said. The new company, based in Sunnyvale, will be called ParcPlace-Digitalk Inc.

"We merged because we have the same customers, similar vision and are attacking the same problem from a different point of view," said Lyons. "We want to have the most complete offering for Fortune 500 developers, and a bigger ParcPlace-Digitalk is a better one. Our development staff now increases by 75%."

Once "people issues" are ironed out, ParcPlace-Digitalk should derive benefit from its combined strengths -- Digitalk's in native Windows clients and visual development for classes and components, and ParcPlace's in Unix servers.

"I wonder how they will merge the two Smalltalks together," said Tina Saulsbury, programmer analyst, information products at Sprint, Kansas City, Mo. Sprint uses both Smalltalk versions. "Some of the class libraries are set up differently," Saulsbury said.

According to James Anderson, Digitalk chairman, the merged company will be working on bringing class libraries into closer conformance to accommodate customers who use Digitalk Smalltalk on the client and ParcPlace Smalltalk on the server.

"This market consolidation is very positive," said Tom Moldauer, a partner at Chicago-based Andersen Consulting. "We are heading toward standardization and focus in object-oriented technology."