Merger with MASSCOMP
An announcement was made on August 1, 1988,[2] that there would be a merger between Concurrent Computer Corporation and the Massachusetts Computer Corporation (MASSCOMP). 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. 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. As part of the deal, MASSCOMP bought out Perkin-Elmer's share in Concurrent. Unusually, the merged entity kept the name Concurrent Computer Corporation and Sims remained as CEO of it.[9] The merged company's headquarters was the one used for Concurrent in New Jersey,[5] which was also somewhat atypical. The transaction closed on September 27, 1988.[10]
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.[9] In addition, MASSCOMP brought expertise in the Unix operating system, which was rapidly becoming the popular choice for these kind of system offerings. The MASSCOMP flavor of Unix was called RTU, for Real-time Unix.[11] It was featured as the operating system on the Series 5000 and Series 6000 systems.[5]
As it happened, the merger was fraught with obstacles. 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. There were also severe clashes of company culture and dueling product development teams. Finally, improved offerings in the real-time space by larger competitors such as IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation proved difficult to undercut.[12] As one industry analyst subsequently said, the merger "didn't produce anything but problems for Concurrent." In 1990 there was a change at the CEO position at Concurrent, with Sims out and Denis R. Brown in.[13] Soon as well a turnaround expert had been brought in.[12] Another CEO switch happened in 1993, with John Stihl taking over.
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,[14] as well as participating in the definition of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS).[15]
By the early 1990s, Concurrent had about 1,250 employees. It put out the Series 8000 product, which was based on the MIPS R3000 processor with RTU running on it.[5] The company's major sales areas were in applications that included weather forecasting, air control, radar simulation, and financial trading.[16]
