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Technology Stocks : IBM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (5406)	7/12/1999 4:35:00 PM
From: George W Daly, Jr.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8218

Hi Don, My perspective (comments are mine, NOT IBMs) is that the hole they are trying fill for short term is to get a cheaper way of going above 8-way systems in the Intel space. Today, Netfinity offers flat SMPs up to 8-way but a customer has to go to an SP configuration of those 8-way nodes to get above that. Sequent does their 64-way (and supposedly going to 256-way) via NUMA technology. My guess is that this would be a cheaper solution than going to SP for many customers, but I've not seen any direct comparisons of the numbers, just qualitative discussions about SP requiring multiple images and copies of the software, etc. From the press release I read it also claims that on Sequents 64-way machines, they could run one set of processors on NT and another set on the same machine in Unix. Thats a pretty neat trick and a capability IBM doesn't have today. Interoperability for customers who would require it, I doubt its a huge market but probably some additional opportunities for the sales force. The purchase also give IBM access to the people who should be experts at tuning Oracle etc. for large NT systems that could be useful in large account situations. Long term it gives IBM a full menu of choices of mix and match for OSes and hardware platforms for servers, but my concern with that is of course implies more expense in terms of development and support. I would expect consolidation eventually if the product line gets too large again. We've gone to great lengths to combine AS400 and RS6000 hardware platforms to save development expense and I would imagine there will be similar efforts in the future. Hope this helps GW