Sycor May Lose Corporate Identity

Sycor may lose corporate identity

By Rick Fitzgerald

BUSINESS-LABOR REPORTER

Sycor Inc, a $77 million Ann Arbor-based computer manufacturing firm, may be on its way to losing its corporate identity under a new management plan announced by Northern Telecom Ltd., the Canadian firm that owns Sycor.

Richard Wertheim, Northern Telecom’s manager of investor services, says Sycor “may be dissolved” as part of a plan to bring Sycor and the Minneapolis, Minn.-based Data 100 Corp. under one management organization.

Last week Northern Telecom, Canada’s largest telephone maker, announced it was forming Northern Telecom Systems Corp. as an “umbrella” corporation to oversee Sycor and Data 100. The two firms make similar products and both play major roles in the development of electronic “office of the future” equipment for Northern Telecom.

WERTHEIM SAYS John C. Lobb, former chairman and chief executive officer of the mammoth parent company, has been named chairman and president of the new umbrella corporation that will have offices in Minneapolis.

A Northern Telecom statement on the change says Sycor and Data 100 “will form the nucleus of the operations of the new company.” Wertheim says that “downstream” that probably means Sycor and Data 100 will lose their own corporate identities and status as wholly owned subsidiaries of Northern Telecom.

He says the companies may continue to operate using the same names, but as divisions of the parent firm. “We certainly value the trademarks,” Wertheim says.

THE IMMEDIATE impact on Sycor’s Ann Arbor operations is minimal, Wertheim says, because while these changes are real possibilities, no final decisions have been made. He says Sycor production facilities "will certainly stay in Ann Arbor."

The changes that may be coming, however, do cloud the futures of members of Sycor’s corporate staff. Wertheim says the logical move is to consolidate “common trusts” with Data 100 and other Northern Telecom operations, but he says what will be consolidated and when has not been determined.

While Wertheim says it'has not been decided what changes might be made at the top level of Sycor or Data 100, he says it is “certainly a possibility that some Sycor people could go to Minneapolis” sometime in the future. What this all means to Sycor management is not clear.

Larry Bobrowski, Sycor public relations contact, said company officials would have no comment on the matter. Sycor president and founder Samuel Irwin has been consistently unavailable for comment.

WERTHEIM SAYS Lobb “will lookat them (the two firms and their personnel) and then determine who he might need on his staff.”

According to a Northern Telecom statement on the changes, bringing Data 100 and Sycor under one management umbrella will better integrate the two firms •

Irwin also was, at one point, being considered to head the umbrella corporation, but that was before the acquisition of Data 100 in August. i After that move, Wertheim says it was decided that an “outsider” not associated with either company would be better able to assess what needed to be done.

ALTHOUGH IRWIN’S control over the destiny of the company he founded in Ann Arbor may be clouded, the Sycor president will become part of a newly formed corporate management group operating from the office of Northern Telecom Chairman Robert C. Scrivener.