Shiva to close Scottish Spider

Struggling vendor Shiva is believed to be on the verge of closing down its Scottish branch, axing 120 jobs as the manufacturer continues in its attempt to realign its business.

According to a source, Shiva's Edinburgh office, previously Spider Systems - acquired by the manufacturer in June 1995 for $80 million - will be shut by 15 April.

A source said: 'Historically, Spider Systems specialised in ISDN, but Shiva is moving away from this older technology.'

Phillip Crocker, marketing director at Shiva, dismissed suggestions of the closure as speculation, but refused to categorically confirm or deny them.

Crocker said: 'As a public listed company, Shiva is legally bound not to pass comment on speculation about the company.'

However, a source said: 'The old-style ISDN technology staff are based in Scotland and because Shiva is trying to streamline the business, it is unlikely this office will exist past April.'

Shiva has continued to sustain losses as its Q4 results for the year ended 3 January revealed a deficit of #2.2 million. This was compared with a net income of #1.5 million for the previous year.

Revenue also fell from #48.2 million in 1997 to #7.9 million for the year.

Europe, said: 'An arrangement of this kind is unprecedented. It says a lot about the impact IntelliCAD is set to have on the CAD market.'

Simon Weeks, director of C2000's CAD division, said: 'C2000 has been achieving exceptional levels of success with the AutoCAD LT product. Accordingly, we will not be distributing Visio's IntelliCAD, since we believe this might detract from our current Autodesk CAD product focus.'

Axel Lagerborg, general software manager at Computer 2000, said the decision was simply a matter of focus: 'No agreement has been signed. We have decided to focus on AutoCAD LT because it provides higher margins than the Visio product.'