JC - UIS is an old-line mainframe shop. They are burdened with a high cost structure and a niche market which has little aside from customer loyalty to protect it. They have moved into the "big NT Server" space to try and translate their technology, which is still quite good, into something they can grow with.
I don't expect UIS to sell a lot of those boxes on their own, but CPQ, and now apparently HP, are going to OEM the Unisys box. That is actually a nice testament to the UIS design - clearly both HP and CPQ have the ability to build a box like that on their own, but instead chose to use the UIS box.
I think that is more of a time to market issue as long term, I know both HP and CPQ have plans for large (256P) machines based on IA64, but not until the McKinley version, which is at least a year out. The UIS box has an interesting capability - it can run both IA32 and IA64 in the same machine. Also dynamic reconfiguration and resource allocation. Their roadmap shows a 64 way version with either IA32 or IA64 in summer of 2001. If Intel delivers the IA64 parts, fine, if not, then at least they have a 64P XEON machine, which should be at 1.5 GHz by that time (assuming Intel can actually deliver, something that some would question). |
