History (1994): Wealthy EMC Buying Copernique

EMC Corp. (Hopkinton, MA) has bought back from Cap Gemini Sogeti (CGS) the 93% shares it owned in Copernique (La Celle Saint Cloud, France), a French company specialized in disk controllers for the client/server environment.

Bull remains a 7% shareholder and signed an OEM agreement with EMC over three years and $50 million to supply disk subsystems.

The price of the transaction was not disclosed, but it will only be a drop in EMC’s accounts that actually owns $395 million cash.

Copernique, with 90 employees, sold approximately FF100 million in 1993, with a balanced management but a fiscal loss on account of CGS’s withdrawals in the past 3 years.

According to John Ryan, director of financial relations, EMC Corp., the subsidiary will simply be integrated into its client/server unit that already includes a recent acquisition, Epoch Systems.

Copernique is one of the French companies with high technical competence that didn’t want to or couldn’t acquire an international dimension. It was set up in 1980 by François Michel, a former technical manager of SEMS, who wanted to build a device entirely dedicated to data base management. It didn’t go any further than the design and manufacturing of the DIRAM, a high availability intelligent disk controller with cache memory and fault tolerance. 1,600 samples of this unique product, very pioneering at that time, were sold, with 80 only for the French electronic directory.

But it hardly came out of the country. In 1990, in good shape in those days, CGS, primarily a service company, took a majority share in the business, but had other worries than disk sales.

“We couldn’t make out without an American,” concludes François Rebeyrol, GM, Copernique.

EMC already has a subsidiary in France, in Boissy Saint Leger, with 80 people and expects to report FF200 million sales this year, twice more than last year, according to its GM, Jean Mouleyre.

This year, EMC Corp. expects 30% of its sales to come from Europe, compared to 22% in 1991.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠74, published on March 1994.