Mary *OT* - A bit more on the mainframe world. Perhaps the Justice Dept should have gone after IBM instead of Intel, the 95% market share figure is pretty high <ggg>. Note the comments on mainframe/internet computing...
Regards,
John
Sunday May 2, 1:49 pm Eastern Time
New IBM mainframes to ship in May, ahead of plan
By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK, May 2 (Reuters) - International Business Corp. (IBM - news) is set to
unveil on Monday the company's new generation of mainframe computers, the world's
highest-capacity business machines, and ship them at least a month ahead of schedule.
The G6 mainframes -- IBM's sixth generation mainframe since 1994 -- once again
smash industry performance records and give IBM a sales head-start on even more
powerful machines due out in September from rival Hitachi Data Systems.
The new IBM computers, officially called the S/390 Parallel Enterprise Server - Sixth
Generation, can process 1,600 million instructions per second (MIPS), or 50 percent
more data-handling capacity than IBM's record-setting G5 machines.
G6 mainframes are set to begin shipping May 28, at least a month ahead of IBM's
original schedule.
''The S/390 G6 Server provides the capacity, bandwidth and flexibility that customers
need to run an integrated e-business,'' said David Carlucci, general manager of IBM's
S/390 division, using IBM's term for Internet-based business.
Mainframes, despite IBM's diversification into software and computer services, remain
key to financial performance for IBM, the world's largest computer maker. Each
mainframe sale tends to bring in additional software and services revenue.
''Obviously, the more successful we are shipping 390 (computer) capacity, the more it
benefits our middleware (software) business, our financing business, and to some degree
our services business,'' Carlucci said.
IBM hopes the G6 machines will capitalize on the momentum of the G5 Server, which
analysts say has captured as much as 95 percent of worldwide sales of mainframe
computers over the last three quarters, leaving only crumbs for Hitachi Data and Fujitsu
Ltd.'s Amdahl, IBM's two direct competitors.
Hitachi Data, a joint venture between Japan's Hitachi Ltd. and U.S.-based Electronic
Data Systems Corp. (EDS - news) , has said its Skyline Trinium, due in September, will
be able to process up to 3.2 billion instructions per second.
''Every month that IBM can deliver the G6 before Hitachi can deliver their new Trinium
just means more business for IBM,'' said Charlie Burns, an analyst with Giga
Information Group.
By arriving early, the G6 line-up gives IBM a head-start not only on rivals like Hitachi,
but on a possible purchasing slowdown in the second half of 1999, as customers turn to
focus on possible Year 2000 glitches in existing machines instead.
''We saw 1999 as a bit of a unique year as to how much disruption customers would
implement, particularly as the year carried on,'' IBM's Carlucci said.
The 50 percent increase in capacity of the G6 systems is partly a function of new
microprocessors using high-speed copper-wiring -- a technology developed at IBM --
instead of conventional aluminum-wired chips, IBM said.
Carlucci said IBM is marketing the G6 to handle not just traditional corporate database
and transaction processing jobs but demanding new workloads like electronic
commerce. The G6 handles business intelligence -- combing massive company
databases for marketing data -- and electronic resource planning (ERP) -- stitching
together key business operations like manufacturing, payroll and human resources.
Toward that end, Germany's SAP AG (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: SAPG.F),
the world's No. 1 maker of ERP software, will announce at a conference in Nice,
France, this week that by the fourth quarter G6 mainframes will be optimized to boost
the performance of SAP software.
In this, IBM is looking past traditional markets to compete in the biggest growth market
-- handling Internet transactions -- against rivals like Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP -
news) and Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW - news).
H-P and Sun make high-performance server computers running UNIX software. In
recent years, they have won the lion's share of orders for computers used to run
Internet-based businesses.
But IBM mainframes -- once written-off as dying technology -- are once again in
fashion due to their time-tested readiness in handling millions of simultaneous customer
requests -- an increasing necessity on popular Web sites.
This is because electronic commerce transactions over the Web are much the same
thing as the ''online tele-processing'' IBM invented in the 1960s to allow corporate
customers to shift mainframe data over dedicated phone lines. Instead of a central
company computer serving only its own office workers, mainframes are now used to
supply data to millions of customers -- creating unpredictable surges in usage -- but
surges IBM has decades of experience in handling.
The design of mainframes allows computer administrators to allocate up to 100 percent
of capacity to respond to sudden spikes in customer usage, a sharp contrast to UNIX
computers from Sun or H-P or ''server farms'' running Microsoft's Windows NT, which
must rely on spare computers to handle such spikes.
These new computer functions, which are becoming widespread among large corporate
computer users, now comprise about 27 percent of the tasks handled by IBM
mainframes, up from only 5 percent or so in 1997, Carlucci said.
The figures are important as they suggest that mainframes -- which for decades have
stored most of the world's corporate data but were seen as dinosaurs at the start of this
decade -- are once again finding favor in the Internet era.
''We really put the competitive focus on Sun and H-P rather than looking strictly at our
traditional competitors,''
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