Stratus agrees to pay $15 million for software unit of BellSouth.

MARLBORO, Mass. - Stratus Computer Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a company that sells software to big banks that links legacy mainframe systems with networks of personal computers.

Stratus, based in Marlboro, has agreed to pay about $ 15 million in cash for a unit of BellSouth, the Atlanta-based telephone company.

The unit, BellSouth Systems Integration Inc., is expected to generate $10 million in revenue in 1993 and has 74 employees, nearly all of whom will remain with the unit.

The unit, whose clients include Bank of Boston, Citicorp, and First Interstate Bank, Los Angeles, will continue to operate from Atlanta under the same management team.

The software company's flagship product, called Network Express, lets banks gather information from dissimilar computers, networks, and databases into a single point, where it can then be shared over networks of personal computers.

The software runs on Stratus computers and lets banks distribute information more freely to their customers, in a type of information sharing called client-server computing, without changing the way their core systems are run.

The computer company says that BellSouth had generated $60 million of sales for Stratus.

Early this month, Stratus completed a previously announced acquisition of Shared Financial Systems, a Dallas-based vendor of software that runs on Stratus computers.

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