Jobs, in Europe, hints at product futures
by Elizabeth Heichler
London Ð NeXT CEO Steve Jobs revealed pieces of NeXT's emerging product road map during two September stops in Europe.
At the German Unix Users Group (GUUG) meeting in Wiesbaden, Germany, Jobs drew a crowd that overflowed into adjoining halls for his keynote speech. He then flew on to London, where about 100 information-technology executives attended his invitation-only presentation at the Savoy Hotel.
Among the highlights:
- NEXTIME, video-playback software with built-in compression and decompression, will be ready for beta testing early next year and is scheduled for a spring 1994 ship date.
- DBKit 2, a rewrite of NeXT's database-development environment, will ship next summer, according to Jobs. "It's quite remarkable, and another big leap forward in being able to construct client-server applications against SQL databases," Jobs said.
- The NEXTSTEP port to Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture is ahead of schedule and may be shown in a sneak preview at Comdex in November. The product will go into beta testing in the first quarter of 1994 and ship on schedule in the second quarter, said Jobs.
- PA-RISC versions of Portable Distributed Objects and NetInfo will go into beta testing this month and ship in the fourth quarter of 1993.
- NeXT is working on an advanced network-management system. "Some of the stuff we're doing for release in the 1995 time frame is going to take a quantum leap in that area," he said.
In related European news, Jobs disclosed that a British PC manufacturer will soon join NeXT's list of OEMs. Although he declined to identify the firm, Jobs used an Elonex Plc '486-based system for his NEXTSTEP demo, and an Elonex representative acknowledged that the London-based company will be making an announcement concerning NEXTSTEP in the near future.
NeXT's alliance with Hewlett-Packard has proven valuable in making sales in Europe. Jobs said that Hewlett-Packard brought NeXT in to its most important account in Germany, where NEXTSTEP will be installed in a pilot project. Sources identified the new customer as Germany's largest bank, Deutschebank.
Although it was not announced, sources acknowledged that NeXT is close to a large deal at London-based international law firm, Linklaters & Paines. The firm is in the final stages of evaluating NEXTSTEP, said Dr. Andrew Taylor, head of information systems and strategy, and if all goes as planned will expand its 60-user pilot project to a 1500-user worldwide installation in early 1995.
Elizabeth Heichler is the European correspondent for the IDG News Service.