 Computing SA's scheduled face to face with Computer Man of the Year Nic Frangos was postponed – he had been called to London for a meeting about Unidata's acquisition of Timeplex. So we had to wait a day or two before we could speak to him about Unidata and where it's headed.
( 16/09/91 )
Unidata's chairman Nic Frangos is a visionary – he's just been named the Computer Society's Computer Man of the Year but he's also a strong leader. Eager to share the spoils with his team, he says “I hope the award is a recognition of the progress Datakor has made as an organization. I regard it as a tribute to the people. I don't consider it an individual achievement.”
It's this combination of vision and leadership that has spurred Unidata on, and Frangos says the company has made enormous progress in the last five years.
The company also has a corporate college, headed up by Karen Toombes and started earlier this year.
“I wanted to have something of a symbolic nature for our people to identify with. The future belongs to people who want to enhance their skills. The college was a way to do that,” he says.
He's very pleased with the way it is running. It's an endorsement of his vision that the college is in place, in spite of there being no fast buck in it. Says Frangos: “It is not a short term thing.” The college follows the principle of incremental improvements, which yield small improvements in the short term, but very big impromvements in the long term. The college motto is Semper in Incremento, Latin for consistent, incremental improvement.
Frangos has also been involved behind the scenes politically for “a couple of decades.” By the nature of the work, he doesn't want to talk about it, and has deliberately kept a “zero profile.”
On the business front, Unidata is becoming a world player with the acquisition of Timeplex, which will “make Unidata into a defecto international player,” says Frango.
About the Timplex deal, he weights his words carefully. “It is making progress,” he says, but he doesn't want to be drawn out about the details. “We still don't have all the necessary approvals. It will probably be finalized at the end of the month or early October.”
In addition to Timeplex, the corporation has set targets for the amount of revenue to be generated outside the country. Frangos believes that without acquiring technology, South Africans in the high technology industry can't joint the international fray effectively.
Unidata hasn't been immune to the trend toward downsizing, which Frangos calls “irreversible.” In a rapidly more complex industry, the company is becoming more involved in that arena. As Frangos says, there is no longer only horizontal competition, which he defines as midrange against midrange, mainframe against mainframe and PC against PC. Competition has become vertical as well, with midrange machines encroaching on mainframe turf and PCs networks and workstations attacking the midrange arena.
A joint venture with Olivetti called OIT sees the company strongly involved in the DEC market, and while some analysts see DEC floundering in the face of the Unix and open systems drive, he patiently points out that DEC is the second biggest computer company in the world.
“I'm optimistic about OIT. We're a dominant player in that market, and I hope to see that continue.”
Following the recent acquisition of Joffe, he is full of praise for Len de Villiers. He's set good goals, and is showing good leadership. He has a strong customer orientation.”
Frangos is hopeful for the future. He sounds a cautionary note for shareholders looking forward to the first half results, but expects that the results for the full year will at least match last year's performance. Given the visionary leader at the helm, that trend is likely to continue for some time. |
Featured Articles