Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme

» see sni.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Siemens Nixdorf opened on 1 October 1990 and closed on 1 October 1999, nine years to the day, which is tidier than most companies manage. On the first of those days it was the largest information technology company in Europe, built out of Nixdorf Computer AG and Siemens' own data systems division, with more than fifty thousand employees of whom twenty-five thousand came across from Paderborn. On the same first day it was the sixth largest in the world, behind IBM, DEC, Fujitsu, NEC and Unisys. Those two sentences are the entire strategic position: dominant in a region, subscale on the planet.

What it inherited was a casualty. Nixdorf had lost around a billion marks in 1989, and the merger plans became public on 10 January 1990, days after Klaus Luft resigned as its head. Hans-Dieter Wiedig came over from Siemens to run the combined company with Horst Nasko, Luft's successor, as his deputy. The losses carried straight across the join and stayed: $279.8 million in the 1993 fiscal year, $233.7 million in 1994, with the first profit arriving only around 1995, at $43.8 million before tax, under Gerhard Schulmeyer, who had been brought in from ABB the previous year.

By then Siemens had already decided what SNI was for. In 1992 it took the shareholding to a hundred percent and folded the company into the group, and from 1995 it began lifting pieces out by function rather than selling the whole thing. By the time the Fujitsu joint venture arrived in 1999, it was the last step of a dismantling that had been running for four years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ fifty-one thousand six hundred ~

Headcount peaked at 51,600 on 30 September 1991, the end of the first full fiscal year, and the reduction started almost immediately. A 1993 plan targeted around nine thousand jobs. By the 1994 fiscal year the company was down to roughly thirty-nine thousand, a fall of twenty-four percent in three years, with another two thousand announced at those results. The cuts landed on Paderborn and on both plants at Augsburg. An analyst quoted in Computerwoche in 1991 had said the company was overstaffed by about fifteen thousand people, so the shrinking was neither a surprise nor, by that measure, finished.

Most people never touched the expensive part of this company. The mainframes and the Unix boxes went into banks and ministries and insurance companies, and the things an ordinary person in an ordinary office put their hands on were a monitor and a keyboard. SNI was among the largest monitor manufacturers in Germany, and the Augsburg keyboard plant laser-etched its keycaps after assembly so that a country variant did not need a separate stock of parts. The mark on those keyboards is what survives in photographs, two words stacked with a turquoise bar between them, sitting on desks all over Europe attached to machines nobody had chosen.

~ taken apart by function ~

The dismantling ran in three cuts. In 1995 the services and solutions business was lifted out of SNI, combined with parts of Siemens AG, and set up as Siemens Business Services, which eventually became part of Atos. On 1 October 1998 the AG ceased to function as an operating company, more pieces went to Siemens Business Services, and the retail and banking hardware unit was renamed Siemens Nixdorf Retail and Banking Systems GmbH. Computerwoche had reported the plan that March, quoting Handelsblatt, and had put the open question plainly: whether this meant the end of SNI was not yet decided.

It was decided the following year, twice over on the same date. Fujitsu and Siemens signed a memorandum of understanding on 17 June 1999 and said operations would start on 1 October, a fifty-fifty venture with equal board representation; the Siemens computer division going in carried about four billion euros of revenue and some eight thousand people, which is one sixth of the headcount SNI had opened with. On that same 1 October, KKR and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners took the retail and banking unit out of the Siemens group, and it was renamed Wincor Nixdorf. The compound name was dropped at the first opportunity by the half that went independent, which kept only the Nixdorf end of it.

~ what outlived it ~

Quite a lot, as it turns out, mostly by changing hands. BS2000, the mainframe operating system, went into Fujitsu Siemens and is still a Fujitsu product today, running on hardware unrelated to the machines it was written for. SINIX became Reliant UNIX. The Beetle point-of-sale system, developed in the early 1990s, went to Wincor Nixdorf and kept going in supermarket chains. The telephone side ran longest of all: the Octopus E exchanges, descended from a digital switching system the Bundespost first approved in 1982, were sold until 2006.

Two endings are worth recording against each other. Fujitsu bought out the Siemens half for around 450 million euros with effect from 1 April 2009 and renamed the company Fujitsu Technology Solutions, so the Siemens name left the computer business entirely. And the domain tells its own version: sni.de served a real site of three and a half kilobytes until April 1999, and by March 2000 it was serving seven hundred bytes of JavaScript that read the hostname and forwarded you, under the title "Wincor Nixdorf Internet". The address of Europe's largest computer company ended up as a redirect maintained by the division that got out.

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