Redwood City, CA Ð Hoping to bring users of Wang's proprietary VS mainframes into the world of open systems via NeXTstations, NeXT is making an aggressive play for the current Wang office-automation market. The plan is outlined in a confidential 26-page "Wang Selling Guide."
The key to NeXT's plans is Lightspeed, a file-conversion program that will let NeXTSTEP computers access files stored on Wang VS mainframes. Manufactured by Bakersfield, California-based Macsoft, Lightspeed will also let NeXT users emulate Wang 2110 terminals by logging onto Wang VS mainframes and directly running Wang applications.
"Lightspeed is available in character mode now for most of the UNIX platforms," said Ken Rosen, NeXT's manager of strategic markets. He added that a NeXTSTEP interface should be ready within a few months.
Using Lightspeed, Wang users translate documents from Wang's proprietary WP system into WordPerfect format. The documents would then be managed using a document-management system. NeXT has already made inroads at five major Wang sites, said Rosen, each with 100 to 200 users.
Wang users have been in a quandary since Wang declared bankruptcy this summer. Once a leader of the office-automation market, with a mid-1980s annual revenue in excess of $2 billion, Wang never delivered WYSIWYG word processing or open systems to its users, and sales dropped off dramatically in recent years.
Under the protection of Chapter 11, "they are reinventing themselves from a proprietary hardware company to an open-system integration company," said Rosen.
But Wang's user base Ð often regarded as one of the most technically sophisticated and demanding in the industry Ð isn't standing still. The annual U.S. Society of Wang Users conference, Technitron, has become a forum for Wang users to compare what they have with the best that the computer industry has to offer. The society has invited NeXT CEO Steve Jobs to present a keynote address in Boston in November.
"We're looking at open systems, and NeXT has a lot to offer in that area," said Bill Sturgeon, president of the user group.