Concurrent Computer Corporation
American computing vendor From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Concurrent Computer Corporation was an American computer company, in existence from 1985 to 2017, that made real-time computing and parallel processing systems. Its products powered a variety of applications including process control, simulators, data acquisition, and video-on-demand. It was based in Monmouth County, New Jersey, initially, and then later in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Duluth, Georgia.
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| Company type | Public |
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| Nasdaq: CCUR | |
| Industry | Computer systems |
| Founded | 1985 |
| Fate | 2017, pieces acquired by Battery Ventures and Vecima Networks |
| Headquarters | |
Key people |
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| Products |
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| Revenue | $247 million (1987) |
Number of employees |
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| Website | www |
Origins and initial efforts
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The company was created in November 1985 when the computing division of Perkin-Elmer, the Data Systems Group, was spun off as a separate company.[1] The computing group, which had started out as the company Interdata before Perkin-Elmer acquired it in 1974,[1] had been profitable with sales of $259 million, but had tended to have reduced visibility within the computing industry due to being owned by a diversified parent.[2] At first, the new company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Perkin-Elmer, but with the intentions of putting a minority ownership in the company up for a public stock offering.[1] This was subsequently done, with Perkin-Elmer retaining an 82 percent stake in Concurrent;[3] the remainder went on sale in February 1986 and opened at $20 per share.[4] The stock traded on the NASDAQ exchange.[4]
James K. Sims, who had been general manager of the computer unit within Perkin-Elmer,[2] became president and CEO of the new company.[1] It had a large presence in Monmouth County, New Jersey, with some 1,700 staff making it one of the county's largest private employers.[2] Its plant in Oceanport had 800 employees alone.[2]
By 1987, Concurrent had nine separate offices in various locations in Monmouth County.[5] Corporate headquarters had initially been Holmdel, but during 1987 moved to Tinton Falls.[5]
The initial focus of Concurrent Computer Corporation was in the 32-bit superminicomputer market, with an offering that emphasized parallel processing.[1] Their oldest product was the Series 3200, which came from its Interdata heritage and was based around a proprietary discrete component processor that supported 8 sets of registers and was built using the AMD Am2900 bit-slice chip set. The 3200 Series ran the OS/32 real-time operating system.[6] Two newer products were the Series 5000, based on a Motorola 68020 processor, and the Series 6000, based on a Motorola 68030.[6] In these products, the company focused on the market for high-end, rapid-response applications.[3] Aircraft simulators were an especially important market.[7]
Many of Concurrent's customers were in the defense and aerospace industry.[8] Accordingly, Concurrent offered a line of compilers for the Ada programming language that at the time was often mandated for such applications.[6] The company's C3Ada product came out in 1987; it ran on OS/32 and was among the early wave of commercial products to get past the strenuous Ada Compiler Validation Capability (ACVC) validation suite.[9] The company's languages group investigated the challenges of implementing Ada, with its built-in tasking feature, on a real-time system with multiple processors,[7] and in how best the requirements of real-time systems could be expressed in the language.[10]
The Fortran programming language was perhaps the most popular choice for applications on the Concurrent platform.[9] Optimizing Fortran for a shared-memory multiprocessor presented special issues regarding do loops and cache thrashing, a subject that the compiler staff at Concurrent studied extensively.[11]
By 1988, there were some 2,800 employees in the company overall,[4] and at its peak, the Oceanport manufacturing facility would have nearly 1,000 people working at it.[12] Revenue for 1987 was $247 million.[4]
Merger with MASSCOMP
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An announcement was made on August 1, 1988,[4] that there would be a merger between Concurrent Computer Corporation and the Massachusetts Computer Corporation (MASSCOMP).[13] Technically, MASSCOMP purchased Concurrent for $241 million and was the surviving company, even though Concurrent was more than three times the larger of the two.[3][8] This "minnow-swallows-the-whale" style of merger was prevalent during the 1980s and in this case, as often happened in the era, it was largely financed by junk bonds.[8] As part of the deal, MASSCOMP bought out Perkin-Elmer's share in Concurrent.[3] Unusually, the merged entity kept the name Concurrent Computer Corporation and Sims remained as CEO of it.[3] The merged company's headquarters was the one used for Concurrent in New Jersey,[6] which was also somewhat atypical.[8] The transaction closed on September 27, 1988.[14]
The idea behind the merger was to use MASSCOMP's lower-end offerings in the real-time space to complement Concurrent's higher-end products.[3] In addition, MASSCOMP brought expertise in the Unix operating system, which was rapidly becoming the popular choice for these kind of system offerings.[13] The MASSCOMP flavor of Unix was called RTU, for Real-time Unix.[16] It was featured as the operating system on the Series 5000 and Series 6000 systems.[6]
As it happened, the merger was fraught with obstacles.[13] The debt load imposed by the acquisition proved difficult to reduce, a problem made worse by the advent of the early 1990s recession in the United States, and there were a series of layoffs in the Monmouth County facilities.[8] There were also severe clashes of company culture and dueling product development teams.[13] Finally, improved offerings in the real-time space by larger competitors such as IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation proved difficult to undercut.[13] As one industry analyst subsequently said, the merger "didn't produce anything but problems for Concurrent."[17] In 1990 there was a change at the CEO position at Concurrent, with Sims out and Denis R. Brown in.[8] Soon as well a turnaround expert had been brought in.[13] Another CEO switch happened in 1993, with John Stihl taking over.[17]
The company continued to be involved in the Ada language world during the 1990s. This included being a rapporteur during the Ada 9X definition process,[10] as well as participating in the definition of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS).[18]
By the early 1990s, Concurrent had about 1,250 employees.[19] It put out the Series 8000 product, which was based on the MIPS R3000 processor with RTU running on it.[6] The company's major sales areas were in applications that included weather forecasting, air control, radar simulation, and financial trading.[19]
Merger with Harris Computer Systems
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Due to repayments and a debt-for-equity swap, by 1995 the company's debt load had been reduced from $200 million to under $25 million.[17] A competitor at this point was Harris Computer Systems,[20] a real-time computer systems enterprise recently spun off from Harris Corporation.[21] In 1995, Harris Computer Systems, led by its chief executive E. Courtney "Corky" Siegel, looked to buy Concurrent Computer Corporation, but the discussions ended in acrimony.[17]
Negotiations resumed the following year, albeit in the opposite direction, and in June 1996, Concurrent acquired the high-performance computer business of Harris Computer Systems.[20] However, the corporate headquarters was moved from New Jersey to Harris's location of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.[20] Most of the rest of the New Jersey operations, which had been dwindling due to rounds of layoffs and employees leaving, soon followed.[12] As the Asbury Park Press wrote of the Oceanport facility, "The former headquarters of Concurrent Computer Corp. [is] a once bustling place that has been nearly emptied by corporate downsizing".[15] In July 1997, Concurrent sold the Oceanport building, although it still leasebacked a smaller manufacturing and servicing capability within it,[12] responsible for keeping going an older product line.[15]
In 1999, the headquarters of Concurrent was again moved, to Duluth, Georgia, in the Atlanta metropolitan area.[21] Now CEO of Concurrent, Siegel said the relocation was for better executive access to the rest of the country and for a better talent pool; a factory remained in Pompano Beach, Florida.[22] While Siegel wanted to emphasize the company's video-on-demand product, called MediaHawk, most of the company's $82 million in annual revenues still came from the real-time systems product line.[22]
By the early 2000s, Concurrent was continuing its focus on the video-on-demand market and was selling to companies such as AOL Time Warner and Cox Communications.[23] It also still had a presence in the defense industry, though, with Lockheed Martin as a customer.[23] Its real-time systems were run using RedHawk Linux, Concurrent's adaptation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for real-time requirements.[24] By this time, Concurrent's systems were based on the Intel/AMD processor architecture.[24] Technologies such as these were included in Concurrent's iHawk systems product.[25]
End
During 2017, the pieces of Concurrent Computer Corporation were sold off. In May 2017, the real-time systems business was acquired by the private equity firm Battery Ventures for $35 million.[26] The resulting division was named Concurrent Real-Time, which was later acquired for $166.7 million by Brüel & Kjær, a subsidiary of Spectris plc, in July 2021.[27][28] In October 2017, the video content delivery and storage business was acquired by the Canadian telecommunications firm Vecima Networks for $29 million,[29] in a transaction that appears to have closed in very early 2018.[30]
References
External links
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