Compaq Sells Tandem Research Unit to Former Executives.

Compaq Computer Corp has sold off what used to be Tandem Computers Inc's High Performance Research Center in Germany, it emerged yesterday. The Frankfurt-based center will form the core of a new company, Tantau Software Inc, put together by a group of former Tandem executives including Jimmy Treybig, the founder and former president and CEO of Tandem. It will focus on cross platform application integration and web enablement software for large corporates.

Treybig, who stepped down from the top position at Tandem in 1996, will be chairman of the new, Austin, Texas based company, and his Austin Ventures investment company will lead an $11m initial round of funding alongside Techno Venture Management. Harald Sammer, a 22 year Tandem veteran who led the Tektonic unit, and former Tandem vice president John Sims, are also part of the new company. Sims will take on the role of chief executive officer.

Tektonic has spent the last five years on high-end technologies intended to help large customers tackle performance and scalability issues. Initially, the focus was on high speed message switching between Tandem and non-Tandem servers, and messaging is still the basis of the Krypton component-based application integration platform, which the newly formed Tantau will sell. The Tantau Application Server uses Krypton as its core engine and adds web-enabling components. Titanium, described as a high-speed inter-processor communications layer, is for clustering both Tandem and Windows NT-based systems together. It can apparently work with Tandem's ServerNet interconnect technology. And Tantau also plans to sell a new product just moving into its beta testing stage; InfoCharger, a data analysis tool claimed to be between 100 and 1,000 times faster than traditional database management systems. The group had built up a base of 50 corporate customers, including Daimler-Chrysler, Audi, Merrill Lynch, Tandy and Nasdaq.

Tantau, which was actually formed in February in preparation for the acquisition, gets all the products and intellectual property rights from Tektonic, and has hired all the people. As well as the Frankfurt development labs, there are satellite operations in Finland, Switzerland and Scotland. The company says it has already put a sales force in place in Europe, and is half way to establishing a US team. It also plans to sell through partnerships and reseller agreements it is currently putting in place.

According to CEO John Sims, Compaq sold off the unit because it realized that it needed more funding than it was prepared to provide internally, and that it could see such funding would be easily available externally. Because the Tektonic products run on Tandem, NT, Open VMS, multiple Unix platforms and (soon) MVS, Compaq had difficulty finding a place for the technology within its overall scheme, says Sims. Compaq retains a minority share, but much of the company will be owned by its employees. Tantau doesn't expect to be profitable for its first year, while it builds a marketing structure around the core technology it's acquired. Its main customers are likely to come from the financial services and telecommunications sectors, although internet service providers are another target.