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To: J R KARY who wrote (3044)	5/5/1998 7:56:00 PM
From: Robert Scott Diver	Respond to of 8218

Jim, What wasn't mentioned is that HDS can't compete with IBM on cost per MIP. Now that the MIPs per cluster are comparable, my guess is that this is going IBM's way. With parallel sysplex getting to the point where it is easy to implement, IBM should have both power and cost advantages. <VBG> Scott

To: J R KARY who wrote (3044)	5/5/1998 10:11:00 PM
From: art slott	Respond to of 8218

techweb.com Looking good. Still, he said, IBM's distributed software now accounts for about 40 percent of the company's software business -- up from 33 percent at the end of 1997, and 10 percent four years ago. And, Thompson said, that portion is growing its sales at a 110 percent rate.

To: J R KARY who wrote (3044)	5/6/1998 9:14:00 AM
From: art slott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8218

Top line growth...Top line growth.... Say goodbye to the May 120 Calls IBM to unveil Windows NT business software suites Reuters, Tuesday, May 05, 1998 at 18:50 NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp.(NYSE:IBM) on Wednesday will begin shipping new business software suites designed to run on Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows NT network operating system. For IBM, the new software closes a gap in its business lineup by addressing the fast-growing Windows NT segment of the network market, one which shown strong momentum at the expense of systems that run on Unix, particularly among small and midsized business customers. "NT is growing very rapidly," said Dick Sullivan, vice president for NT marketing at IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y. "The NT market is not a niche market." The suites, which are built around Intel Corp.'s (NASDAQ:INTC) LANDesk management software, are intended as a start-up package for companies and business groups implementing networks for the first time, Sullivan said. In addition to LANDesk, the standard suite includes IBM's applications and messaging software Lotus Domino and its DB2 Universal Database software, as well as communications, storage and sample Intranet sales management software. Pricing is $2,499 for a suite license and $225 per desktop client for users requiring access to all components. A higher-end package, called IBM Enterprise Suite for Windows NT, is also available and is aimed at large companies. Both versions begin shipping on Wednesday. Pricing for the enterprise version is $16.249 per suite and $375 per desktop. IBM said it also planned to begin beta testing of a software suite for small businesses at the end of the month. Copyright 1998, Reuters News Service

To: J R KARY who wrote (3044)	5/6/1998 11:15:00 AM
From: Arrow Hd.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8218

Greiner, though a former IBM Mainframe Product Manager, is a bit off here. The Symphony ten engine cluster will produce about 900 MIPs with factoring in the multi-engine degradation which means when a job is run in single image over multiple engines the machine does not generate the total sum of the engine MIPs but due to the inefficiency of using multiple engines you get only some percentage of the MIPs in performance. That is why a large single engine size is preferred by some customers like the one quoted here. Symphony's engine size is more like 115 MIPs which is still almost doubling the 60 MIPs per engine of last year's Overture announcement. So a very significant improvement. Actually Hitachi's Skyline is not an advanced technology but older Bi-polar technology that due to its architecture produces via packaging and chip design a heavy duty engine which is currently at around 125 MIPs. They may have another turn still so getting to 150 MIPs may be possible but it is very costly to produce and IBM chose to switch to the less expensive CMOS implementation. Further, with multiple models you can sort chips for performance putting the higher MIP chips in the biggest "turbo" machines and utilizing what may have been a "sort failed" chip in smaller machines where the engine performance is not paramount. This avoids chip scrap. This is less an opportunity on the Amdahl and Hitachi lines. Hitachi has taken significant market share in the past couple of years from IBM (IBM 70+, Hitachi 20+, Amdahl 10-). This announcement will allow for reversing that trend and will assist in stemming price attrition due to the fact that IBM now has an equal offering so the need to give a better price to offset the fact that there was an inferior product no longer exists to the extent it did exist. This is only for single engine scenarios where the customer wants the machine with the largest engine. As Scott points out, what customers should be doing is implementing the Parallel Syplex where jobs are not only spread among engines within a machine but between machines. Still, the old paradigm in the mainframe business is engine size and this mostly closes that gap. There are many other exciting pieces to this announcement that we will see tomorrow including a feature that flags Yr. 2000 problems automatically on the fly as the machine runs the customer's application logging them in the system. Though the first customer ship isnt until the third quarter, the G3 and G4 are upgradeable to G5 via a "net priced" upgrade where the MCMs (MCM is the part that has the imbedded engines) are swapped. So IBM can sell the current product family in the second quarter with an upgrade to Symphony in the second half and the "two step" pricing can be made to be indifferent versus waiting for a full Symphony machine later in the year. This is not a new strategy but has been used since the 70s. This is one of the year's most significant announcements and any analyst worth his salt should be recalculating mainframe market-share erosion and price attrition.