Olivetti PC finds a buyer as it pushes new servers

Giuseppe Kuszli, director of the server business unit at Olivetti PC, said last week that the sale of the company to a financial group should be announced within weeks.

He confirmed that the PC company was in the process of being sold and that the buyer is a financial group, not a computer manufacturer.

'We should be making an announcement some time in December,' he said, although he warned that at this stage, the deal could still fall through.

The confirmation ends weeks of speculation, in which manufacturers such as Acer and NEC have been tipped as possible buyers.

The company has also announced a new range of Netstrada servers, which will act as more expensive and higher performance sister products to the Systema range.

Olivetti PC plans to make an aggressive push into the intranet market.

It claims that all models within the Netstrada range have been optimised to take advantage of the latest intranet and Internet applications, including Intranetware from Novell and the latest Microsoft platforms.

All the servers in the Netstrada range are integrated with the Ultrawide SCSI standard, which opens up bandwidth in order to avoid server bottlenecks on the network.

At the low end of the range is the entry level Netstrada 3000. Targeting small to medium-sized businesses, the 3000 comes optionally bundled with Windows NT 4.0 Server and is also available in a rack-mounted configuration.

The server has Ultrawide SCSI, four swappable hard disk drives and an integrated Fast Ethernet controller.

For small to medium-sized businesses with intranet requirements, the Netstrada 5000 runs on a single/dual 200MHz Pentium Pro processor. It can also come bundled with Microsoft Exchange and Windows NT 4.0 Server.

At the high end is the Netstrada 7000. Targeting corporate clients it supports up to four 200MHz Pentium Pro processors, each with 512Kb of cache. It offers the availability of hot swappable hard disk units on Ultrawide SCSI.

Olivetti PC has also brought out a new low-end server to add to its Systema range. Due out in December the SNX 160N is aimed at small businesses that require an entry level server at desktop prices.