Concord, Mass. - Axil Computer, Inc., a pioneer in the eight-way Windows NT server market, may not be around much longer.
The company, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai Electronics America, last week said it will drastically reduce its operations. Axil's board of directors has decided to eliminate all staff positions other than those involved with service and support. Axil said it will continue to fulfill orders through July to a handful of key customers and also will provide support to its installed base.
The Axil news didn't go over big with customers.
"I'm quite disappointed by this," said Chris Walsh, director of engineering at UltraNet Communications, Inc., an ISP in Marlborough, Mass. "[My Axil server] runs my back-end LAN and holds by billing system. . . . It's been a good system; it works very well. My problem now is that I'm not sure where the [product line's] future lies."
There is a chance that Axil will be revived. The company's management team is exploring the possibility of buying Axil's intellectual property from Hyundai Electronics and starting up a new company called Axil2.
"We do have a couple of potential deals to keep something going. Barring those working out we are just winding things down," an Axil spokesman said. "Support could exist in some form for years. There are lots of systems out there."
Axil's demise appears largely to be the result of parent company Hyundai Electronics' financial struggles, said Laurie McCabe, an analyst at Summit Strategies, Inc. in Boston.
The fact that customers are gravitating toward standard rather than proprietary server architectures doesn't favor Axil either, said James Gruener, an analyst with Aberdeen Group in Boston.
Axil's spokesman acknowledged the company, formed in 1993, has yet to become profitable.
Axil's offerings include the Northbridge NX801 eight-way Pentium Pro server and the Northbridge NX803 rack mountable eight-way Pentium Pro server.
Axil's technology has been incorporated into products sold by the likes of Data General Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Both of those firms teamed with Axil in March to form the Crossbar Coalition, a group designed to promote Axil's Adaptive Memory Crossbar as the de facto technology for eight-way Pentium Pro NT servers.
McCabe said Hyundai's decision about Axil's fate leaves Data General and HP "in the lurch," but she said both Axil partners have contingency plans.
Observers said that even though Axil did not have many competitors, it did have at least one really tough rival: Intel Corp. Intel last year bought Corollary, Inc., Axil's primary competitor.
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