IBM Corp sent along Thomas Furey Jr, general manager of worlwide open client-server strategy to represent it at the conference, and he assured the assembly that IBM is ready to compete fully in the client-server market, adding that the company has spent 18 months examining how it could improve its performance: The client-server market is growing over 20% on a compound annual growth rate, Furey said, citing information gathered from IBM surveys; he added that IBM realises that as businesses move to the client-server model, computer vendors must be able to provide products that can interconnect multivendor systems, and must also deliver software that can run on other companies’ products as well; he reckons IBM has delivered about 100 software products for client-server systems, including the DB2 relational database, which originally ran on mainframe computers.
